LBJs

*The blackout ended, for us, in Hour 95, just after 6:00 p.m. on Monday. We celebrated by throwing out everything in the fridge except three beers, some hard-boiled eggs, an unopened bottle of ketchup, an unopened bottle of salad dressing, and six bags of coffee beans. In the course of our excavations, we discovered some Chinese food from the late Tang dynasty and sent it across the bridge of heaven.

*On Sunday we tried to go hiking at White Oak Canyon, but when we arrived at the trailhead we were informed by a ranger that the National Park Service had closed the Shenandoah N.P. completely due to high water and fallen trees. We rescued a few baby snapping turtles from the middle of the road and drove to Charlottesville for some Putt-Putt and Mexican food. I found a replacement copy of Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers and have been letting the first three songs pound through my head ever since. (They're "Mexican Wine," "Bright Future in Sales," and "Stacy's Mom," if you were wondering.)

*Last night I finally got back to the gym. I've been fairly good about staying on the Atkins diet since July, and when I weighed in pre-Isabel, I was still 19 pounds under my starting weight. After being on the road for about three weeks, I could easily have gained back more than two pounds, so I was happy to discover the damage had been minimal. Unfortunately, the diet had been easy compared to finding time for exercise, and I'd gone weeks with nothing more than the occasional walk after dinner, so it felt good to get back to the weights. One eerie note: when I arrived at the gym, no one was there--but the mix CD I'd made for the weight room last year was already playing Talking Heads' "What a Day That Was."

*My fantasy football teams are both undefeated in their respective leagues, but I've got a real test in this week's FLOGG matchup, so I may not be able to make that claim next week. It's been a challenge trying to predict whether Brett Favre or Drew Bledsoe will have the disastrous game each week, but so far I've made the right call. Here's hoping for a big game from Stephen Davis after his bye week, though.

*Dixon heard Rhapsody in Blue for the first time last week and immediately fell in love with it. We found a used copy at the CD store and gave it to him; he's already trying to pick it out on the piano--good luck, kid--and is hoping his teacher will find him a copy of the sheet music. I'm impressed by his ambition. And I can't wait to hear him play it someday.

*Today is Kelly's birthday. I gave her the traditional gift--comic books--and will be taking her out to dinner tonight. Don't expect any further reports.
9:20 AM

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Sixty-five hours and counting.

Not that long, in the grand scheme of things. Not even a full three days yet, and I've had to put up with quite a few things that lasted longer than three days--flu bugs, final exams, that sort of thing. But yes, I'd have to say that at this point the novelty has indeed worn off.

I'm referring to our power outage. All in all, our little community got through the arrival of Hurricane Isabel pretty well, but of course we couldn't know in advance how it would go, which made the whole experience a wee bit more stressful. And my being on dorm duty on Thursday made it a much larger bit stressful. Woodberry gets power from three different sources, and at 3:50 p.m. on Thursday the 18th of September, we lost connection with two of them. There was only a light rain and no sustained wind at the time, but the sudden flickerings in the fine arts center definitely hinted at trouble to come. I dug a flashlight out of the sound booth in case the Black Box Theater was suddenly cast into darkness--the single smartest move I made all weekend, as it turned out.

The theater's emergency lights remained on, and we successfully finished our blocking for the day, but that evening, just after dinner ended at 6:45, the remaining power finally went out. Students were restricted to their dorms, leaving me as one of two duty men in charge of the entire sophomore class and another few dozen juniors and seniors. I spent much of the next four hours wandering the halls with my flashlight, assuring tenth-graders that yes, we would in fact be having classes the next day (as far as I knew) and that they should make whatever efforts they could make to be prepared for them. Some guys even listened to me. I ran several errands that took me outside, where the wind was now roaring from the northeast and the rain was hitting at a pronounced angle. One southward trip to anothe dorm left my back more or less dry on the way there, but when I returned, I totally saturated the front of my entire body.

I sat in on a couple of impromptu jam sessions, borrowing a student's guitar here and there to play Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," Mike Cross's "Elma Turl," and "Food Chain" from King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running. The flashlight proved especially crucial when I became the de facto window inspector. Despite two specific orders to drop what they were doing and close their storm windows, it was soon apparent that our students didn't actually know what a storm window was. At around 8:30, I began the process of inspecting each room on the top floor and realized that while all the main windows were closed, about fifty to sixty percent of the storm windows were wide open, with water flying straight through the screens and pooling in the sills. Complaining loudly (and dragging in all the students I could find), I set to closing off the flood before the rooms below us filled completely. Needless to say, by the time I was dismissed from duty that evening, I was beat--beat enough not to care that my house was dark and my bed full of more children and dogs than usual.

The next morning my internal alarm clock jolted me awake at 7:00 and I got ready for my 8:00 class. Our dining hall, using emergency generators, had prepared us--hallelujah!--a hot breakfast, which led me to call for a round of applause. Had there been coffee, I would have called for a standing O, but alas, it was not to be. It instead fell to my colleague Fred to drive into Orange, where power was still on, and surprise us by bringing back to-go cups for the faculty. Fred's going to get some nice Christmas presents this year.

All in all, we came out fairly well. Power came back to the main campus Saturday night at 9:50--almost precisely 54 hours after the first partial blackout. The campus lost only a handful of trees, most of them already carved up and hauled away. Though the river is high, we had no real flooding, except for our next-door neighbors' toilet overflowing and soaking their carpet. The Rapidan crested at about 18 feet; flood stage is 14, but the record is 30 feet, which it reached in 1995 during the millennial flood that washed away our bridge. By comparison, this was nothing.

What do I want now? Not much. Just power. Light to read by. Hot water. Refrigeration. Because our house is still dark. I'm writing this from my classroom, where I'm firmly in the 21st Century--I can see to work, reach across the globe, or listen to a Norah Jones cover of a Hank Williams song. But when I leave here in a moment, I'm heading back more than a hundred years, to a place where wax and oil provide the only light, where word travels only as fast as I do, where the only music comes from our fingers and our voices.

It's a nice place to visit. But I wouldn't want to live there.
6:17 AM

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