Mountain Girl

Part 1

Part 2

My brother-in-law Rob was taunting me. It was our first visit to the new suburban dream house he and my sister bought when they fled LA for Orlando a few months earlier, seeking the lower home prices and better schools promised by the theme park capital of the world. Now, standing in the kitchen, Rob demonstrated another perk of their new house -- flipping on appliances with abandon. The toaster-oven, the microwave, the coffee maker, even the garbage disposal, the washing machine and -- the final flourish -- every single light switch he could reach.

“Get back on the grid, bay-bee!” he sang at me over the din, dancing back and forth between the stove and the dishwasher that was busily scrubbing the dishes from dinner. I laughed, more than just a little envious of this show of wanton electrical promiscuity.

See, I yearn to be electrically slutty. Some gals fantasize about a zipless fuck with a beautiful stranger. In the rustic Mount Charleston bunker (uh, house) I share with Stewart, I fantasize about running the microwave and the television at the same time, without causing a power spike and subsequent blackout. I want to be turned on, hooked up . . . to the city’s power grid. But instead of tapping into Nevada Power, our Mount Charleston abode -- and this is a significant source of pride with Stewart -- is operated entirely by giant batteries charged by solar-energy.

“We get more than 340 days of sun a year in Las Vegas so it makes sense to use solar power,” Stewart is fond of saying. And he’s right. It does make sense. Unlike the folks down in the Valley, blasting their air conditioners against the summer heat, we don’t have an over-inflated power bill. In fact, we don’t have a power bill at all. Instead, we have swamp coolers -- like tricked out box window fans that are filled with water, which cools the air as it evaporates. Fire places and wood-burning stoves provide heat in the winter.


But occasionally . . . well, let’s just say we run into our own unique snafus. Cloudy days -- they’re like Kryptonite to Superman. No sun, no power. That’s life off the grid, baby. And on frosty mornings, before one of us trudges out to the wood pile to gather thick pine logs to get those home fires going, it’s not unusual for it to be 30 degrees . . . in the kitchen. I layer on a T-shirt, sweater, sweatshirt, second sweatshirt, two pairs of socks and a scarf just to venture out from under the duvet, into the kitchen to make coffee. Once our friend Patrick suggested we go winter camping. That made me laugh. Wryly. I do enough winter camping inside the house, thank you very much.

Running multiple appliances poses its own challenges. Turn on too much stuff simultaneously -- and by too much stuff, I mean, the kinds of things that normal people in normal houses normally take for granted, like a bathroom light, the TV, the garbage disposal, the toaster -- and that just overloads the power inverter (a necessary gizmo that converts battery power into usable electricity for the house) and shuts down the house completely. One lazy Sunday night, we were watching DVDs while I typed away on my laptop. Midway through the movie, the lights flickered, then everything faded to black. The movie stopped, my computer battery kicked on. But our house batteries were drained. We stumbled around in the dark, frantically searching for flashlights, candles, cigarette lighters, anything so we could see, well . . . anything. We don’t live on an actual street, so there was no helpful glow from the street lamps. That night, there wasn’t even a moon. It was just black, black, black outside, like looking into a black velvet sack. The next day, I went to Target and loaded a shopping cart with candles -- pillars, tapers, votives . . . basically anything that could be used as a light source.

“You expectin’ a blackout or something?” the curious checkout gal asked as she tallied up the wax works.

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

So we hoarded watts with Scrooge-like vigilance. Leaving a room without turning off the lights was verboten. And a lot of accessories that I’d considered necessary tools for civilized living had to be rethought. Our fridge, for instance, is powered by propane, and uses about as much power as a 75 watt light bulb. Everything had to be that energy anemic . . . uh, efficient. So, when I moved in, my Krups went into storage. “Coffee makers suck too much power,” Stewart explained, fishing out an ancient French press from the way back of a cabinet. “It makes better coffee,” he insisted. Even though I eventually came to agree, I still missed my Krups. You can’t set a French press to have hot coffee waiting for you in the morning.

So too went my digital clock radio, which got traded for a battery-operated model. Buh-bye waking up to Morning Edition. And my microwave. The one I’d brought out from Brooklyn was branded another power glutton and replaced with an itty bitty one, capable of popping a bag of popcorn in oh, about 10 minutes. For months I lobbied vainly for a toaster, until Stewart discovered I was turning on the whole oven to make a single piece of toast and reasoned that a toaster had to be more energy efficient than that. But there’d be days when Stewart warned me not to microwave (or toast) at all. When it was overcast, the two minutes it would take to brown a bagel could suck the batteries dry.

Stewart likes to remind me that compared to say, the Middle Ages or even the 19th century, with gas lighting, outhouses, horse-drawn carriages, we were living in the lap of luxury. But I didn’t always see it that way. Some days it all felt just a little too Swiss Family Robinson for me.

Stewart was away on business when I experienced my first solo blackout. I optimistically checked the power inverter to see if I’d merely popped the breaker. No such luck. A quick flip-flip of the switch revealed the batteries were dead, dead, dead. There was no power. It was pitch black out, the only lights were the pinprick car headlights on the highway in the distance.

Panic rising, I called Stewart in California.

No problem, he said, trying to calm me down. The generator had gas in it. All I had to do was start it up. The generator is about 150 yards from the house, a trip I wasn’t thrilled about making in the black dark, even with a flashlight. Who knew what was lurking out there. Snakes. Spiders. Coyotes. Once, a mountain lion had dashed between Stewart’s legs in the yard. And even if I didn’t encounter the more exotic beasties, there was still the chance I could run into our neighbor’s pit bull who’d already cornered me once while I taking out the trash.

“First,” Stewart instructed via cell phone, “drive over to the generator, get out the jumper cables and hook them up to your car battery and the generator. Next . . .

WHAT???

“JUMPER CABLES!” I interrupted. “YOU WANT ME TO RESTART THE HOUSE WITH . . . JUMPER CABLES?!!”

I wasn’t sure I knew how to open up my car hood, let alone locate the battery and attach jumper cables to it without electrocuting myself. No, no, no, no, no. There was no way I was fumbling around with jumper cables and car batteries in the pitch black. I didn’t wait for the rest of the instructions.

“This isn’t what I expected when I moved out here!” I screamed into the phone as that icy, prickly, panicked feeling washed over me. I felt trapped. Isolated. Vulnerable. I longed to be back in Brooklyn where there were lights . . .cable . . . neighbors I could meet for a martini. How on earth did I, a confirmed New Yorker, lover of all things urban, get caught out in this empty, lonesome mountain wilderness? I missed the city sooooo much, I’d tear-up just watching the scenery in You Got Mail. And I don’t even like the Upper West Side.

“I can’t live like this!” I hyperventilated. “I want to go back to New York! I’m going back to New York!”

I’d always thought of myself as the calm-under-pressure type, so this was not my proudest moment. Clearly, “good in a crisis” pertained more to a break-your-zipper-on-your-gown-at-a-gala type of emergency because here I was, irrational, hysterical, a total wuss . . . and all because the lights had gone out.

But cursing at Stewart for not being here to fix it wasn’t going to make the generator turn over or recharge the batteries. Even if I did return to New York, I wasn’t getting on a plane tonight. So I had a choice: Go to a hotel. Or hunker down and wait it out. I crawled into bed and huddled nervously under the covers till I drifted, uneasily, to sleep.

In the morning, the sun came up.

And the lights came back on.