I like to think that I don’t need electricity to be happy. I’ll willingly shoulder a backpack and disappear into the woods for a week. Or kayak in Alaska for a month.
During those trips, I don’t miss lights, and I don’t miss dishwashers. Instead, I delight in the freedom found from escaping civilization. Days are filled with climbing peaks, and gathering water and berries. When the light falls, we snuggle into our sleeping bags and go to sleep.
But when the power went out for an evening, as it did in Telluride last Wednesday, I was surprisingly disgruntled. My husband, Andy, was out of town, and both children were asleep. All day, I had been looking forward to finishing a movie that I’d started a while back. I’d traveled to see family the day before and was weary. A movie, dinner, and an hour of quiet were all that I wanted.
I had everything prepped. I’d cooked the burger and chilled the beer. I’d finished packing my older daughter’s lunch and was making a salad when everything switched off. No broiler. No lights. Just silence.
The house folded into the grey twilight of the mountains outside. I held my breath, fearing the girls might wake up. For a moment, I wondered if we might have blown a fuse – maybe I could just flip a switch and right this situation?
A quick look outside, however, confirmed what I already knew – it was off – season in Telluride. A time when the wind howls, and the power in town shuts down more than we’d like to admit. Often enough, in fact, that I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself in ensuing darkness. Indeed, when Andy and I first moved to town, we joked that Telluride had more power outages that rural Kenya, a place we’d just traveled and where the generators often shut off for hours at a time.
I glanced out again at my darkening town. People were lighting candles in houses, a thing I should probably be doing as well.
I lit a few candles and for a moment, was swayed by their magical glow: “It is kind of enchanting,” I said to myself. But in the next instant, I was back to salvaging my date-with-myself plan. I had a laptop – I could watch my movie that way! Perhaps the broiler got hot enough before it died – it could still melt the cheese for my burger!
I raced upstairs while my luke-warm broiler did its best. No use. The movie was stuck in DVD player and could not be extracted. I returned downstairs. I could catch up on the news online! No use. No power, no Internet. Ok, maybe there are some movies on my computer? But as I hunted, the low-battery signal on my computer flashed. I returned to the kitchen, flicking on the light to check in on the status of my burger. No light. Duh!
Finally, I stopped trying. I grabbed my headlamp, popped the mostly warm burger on a dish and grabbed a beer from the fridge. I settled down to a candlelit dinner and reached for an Atlantic Monthly I’d been wanting to read.
I took stock. Cold beer. A yummy dinner. A quiet house. A beautiful mountain town flickering in candlelight. And time to read. It was like camping inside my own house. I breathed deeply for the first time all day.
Renaissance sculptors were thrilled when they discovered the technique of chiaroscuro – chiseling out scenes in relief, using shadows to define the shapes. Through darkness comes light. My evening was much the same. Once I let go of my preconceived notion of how the evening should go, my night went better than it would have if I’d had electricity. Simplicity was exactly what I needed. I just needed a little darkness to show me that light.
Emily Brendler Shoff (ebshoff@gmail.com) teaches and writes in Telluride. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
