Day 51, The Vermont Power Outage Story

This is a story about a rare time I had a great attitude going into a challenging situation and turned it into a positive experience.  We had planned to visit our weekend getaway in Vermont during a couple free days between treatments.  While the weather was good on those days, the days prior had lots of heavy wet snow.  That snow broke a lot of trees that proceeded to take a lot of power lines down with them.  It would be days before the power would be back.  It was also due to get colder, putting the plumbing at risk of freezing.

When we arrived it was 35 degrees inside.  Each exhale left a cloud of fog.  Coats and hats remained on while starting the wood stove.  While the stove warmed up, we went outside to shovel the walkways and deck.  My wife did most of the heavy lifting, I only did what my back would allow.  That meant chopping the heavy snow into relatively tiny blocks and not trying to throw them for distance as I usually do.  Still, I was outside, being active, and doing what I could to maintain as much bone and muscle as possible.

Shovelling complete, it was time to drain the plumbing.  This was a simple matter of attaching a hose to the drain of the well tank and hot water heater and letting the water run outside.  Afterwards it occured to me this would be much more difficult if the place didn’t have a walk out basement, as water typically doesn’t flow up stairs very well.

Draining gets most of the water out, but some stays in the pipes, particular in the horizontal runs.  Normally, you’re supposed to hook up an air compressor and blow the water out.  However, we didn’t have a compressor and didn’t have electricity to run one if we did.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I went to each faucet and literally used lung power to blow water through the pipes as best I could.  The bathroom sink was the most challenging, as my head barely fit under the faucet.

At around this time the wood stove had warmed the place into the 50s and we decided to stay for the night.  It gets dark early this time of year, leaving hours before bedtime without any light.  We decided to go out for dinner.  After that, we listened to a few Abbott and Costello radio shows from the 40s on Spotify.  Radio shows are a different experience than a TV show.  You can talk during many TV shows while still watching without missing much.  With radio, you have to listen.  The dim candle-lit atmosphere also added to the experience.

At this point, I should mention that my father-in-law built a one room cabin back in the 60s.  No power, no plumbing, just basically a wooden tent.  We have experience living without amenities for a short time, so this actually felt like old times and was a bit nostalgic.  One luxury the cabin did have was a commode in the closet, for times when we didn’t want to walk outside in the wee hours to go wee in the outhouse.  That cabin is still ours and is right across the street.  That commode would come in handy after winterizing the toilet.

The next morning we snowshoed across the street to get the commode.  I’m pretty sure that carrying a chamber pot on snowshoes and hoping that nobody drives by to see me doing so is an experience you can all relate to.  It’s just part of the universal human experience, isn’t it?

The moral of this story is that it would have been so easy to be negative.  A lot of my luck has been very bad recently, between advanced cancer and urinary retention.  It would be very natural to throw an extended power outage onto the pile of bad news.  But instead I was able to view it as a problem with a solution (in this case, “solution” can be taken as RV antifreeze poured into the water traps).  It was rather fortunate this happened just prior to starting chemo.  Now I don’t need to stress about further power outages or a furnace failure if I’m unable to travel while recovering from treatment.