I don’t mind the lack of electricity. But I hate feeling powerless.

By Julie Harris, Bangor Daily News Staff

It’s Day 4.

You would think that as an outdoors person who loves to tromp through swamps, gets rained and snowed on and chilled to the bone regularly and thinks the greatest thing in the world is a campfire, I would be more nonchalant about a power outage.

I don’t think it has to do with the physical work necessary to live with no power. Outdoors people know how to do stuff. 

The problem is it wasn’t my choice, we had no real warning of the potential severity of it and we have no control over how and when it gets fixed

The cracking of trees as they came crashing down in the woods around our house Monday, Dec. 18 during the height of the storm was familiar. I had heard that sound daily during the ice storm of 1998. The woods are still scarred by dead and broken trees. 

The terrible wind during the storm brought me back to October 2017.

I was widowed and lived with three dogs in an old drafty farmhouse. I didn’t have backup heat or a generator. The old wood stove had become too much for me to handle and the pellet stove was an early model that didn’t have battery backup. Luckily the temperatures didn’t dip too far below 40.

The 2017 storm took out so many trees and left our power infrastructure crippled for days. 

I lost parts of several of the more than 50-year-old apple trees on my lawn in that storm, but the tree that changed my life was a huge spruce that fell across my driveway and took out the wire and electrical entrance to my house.

Everyone else along the road got their power back within hours, but I would wait a week. I remember working during the day and coming home to a cold house and seeing all of the electricity around me that was out of my reach. 

It was such a horrible feeling of isolation.

I had resigned myself to my situation and was heating water on the grill so I could wash dishes one day when I saw three utility trucks pull up. 

Men jumped out and started sawing the tree and others were on the pole fixing the wires. And since the entrance was only pulled off and not damaged, they put it back on my house for me, eliminating the need for my electrician.

I would have electricity again. I cried. And I hugged the foreman.

This time I am not alone. I am remarried and have family next door. And we are enduring it together.

But when I look out at the two trees leaning precariously on the wires in front of our house and the broken wire dangling from the pole, I can’t help but flash back to that October storm.

To that feeling of helplessness and fear.

The power companies have crews working hard, but their communication has been spotty and inaccurate. That makes it difficult to hold onto hope.

Mainers are independent. We like to help other people but we don’t like to rely on others for our basic needs. Power outages force us to be reliant on others and hope their priorities are in line with ours.

Power outages are the price we pay for living in Maine. They happen more often here than they would in a treeless place. But they also force us to slow down a little. 

In the last couple of days, I have appreciated the quiet moments when my husband and I couldn’t watch TV but could read or listen to music on one of our cell phones. Or the adventure of going out to find gas for the borrowed generator we are using. Or trying to figure out whole meals we can make on the grill so we don’t have to use the stove.

I know our lack of power will be remedied and we will get on with our lives — maybe even salvage our Christmas plans — but the wait is torture. 

Maybe it will be today.