by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

At 10am the power went out here in San Luis Rey last Friday (Sept. 5), and it stayed out. At 10pm, for half an hour, a feeble flow returned, just enough to power my modem and make the filament in the lightbulb glow a faint deep orange. The streetlights, which also lit up during that feeble flow, stayed on for a little longer. The blackout lasted until noon Saturday.

There was no obvious cause; no electrical storm; no storm of any sort. I expect that they were working on something. But, if such was the case, if it was a planned outage, someone should be fired. I imagine the director and the workers quitting work on the problem at 5pm Friday, going home to watch television in their well-lit homes and coming back to work in the morning, while those of us here watched the contents of our freezers defrost.

I'm told that in the campo, the countryside surrounding San Miguel, it's not unusual to lose power for 5-6 days at a stretch. But I imagine that 26 hours is some sort of a record for a neighborhood power outage here inside city limits.

There are poorer neighborhoods than San Luis Rey, at least one. Carmen Denzel writes about her ministries to poor, barely-housed people living along the railroad tracks. But I'm not sure that those folks even have electricity. Whatever the case, San Luis Rey is close to the bottom of the economic totem-pole here in town.

The other thing going against San Luis Rey in terms of receiving respect from city services and especially of staying connected to the grid is that the colonia sticks out all by itself geographically. If, say, Colonia San Rafael is without power, then so are the contiguous neighborhoods of Independencia and Santa Julia. Out here on the northern edge of town, there are no other neighborhoods; we are all by our lonesome.

My apartment is very pretty, and the next street over actually has some expensive houses. Technically, up here on the heights overlooking San Luis Rey, we are in a separate small neighborhood, colonia Insurgentes. Although, who knows where their zip code ends and ours begins?

Personally, I wasn't bothered by the blackout. I've got plenty of candles, and my goat cheese and carrots warming up for a few hours had no ill consequences. In fact, it was pleasant to be disconnected for a while, on a digital fast, away from the media. (My phone still had service, but I don't use it for much.)

I was completely divorced from the news for years when I was in my mid-twenties, attending naturopathic college in Northern California. And the world carried on no worse for my being uninformed. Then, also in my forties, I lived, sometimes for weeks at a time, completely off grid in Vermont, up a mountain, one half mile past the dead end of the town-maintained dirt road where the last electrical pole stood. I was isolated. My "driveway," the old town road that I reopened, ran up through the forest. On those brief occasions when we needed electricity (usually only to make carrot juice or check my email) we started the generator. Even in the summer the basement was cool enough to keep most food fresh. If we needed anything to be really cold (cans of beer) we stuck it in the creek.

My good friend just down the road, up there in Vermont, did have electricity, and, as I say, I was only ever up there in the woods at most a week or two at a time (my main residence being Connecticut). But it was long enough and frequent enough to appreciate the stillness of living off-grid, to become part of the quiet. The same thing happened last Friday night while I was navigating my apartment by candlelight and finishing an article on my laptop.

It may just be psychological, but I believe that I notice when the electrical field stops, when it's gone. It's like a silent buzzing that suddenly stops, a change in the atmosphere, like a scent.

Certain scents powerfully transport me, especially fresh air mixing with inside air, especially if the inside air is a bit musty, as it was at our lake cottage when I was a kid. I used to get the similar sensation entering my cedar-lined house in Vermont after it had been shut up for a week or more.

Last Friday night, in the candle glow there in my kitchen, looking out onto the campo that begins just beyond this northern edge of town (the frontier whereon are built the pricey homes), the fresh air wafting in through an open window, I felt like I was in Vermont or at my family's cottage on Lake Terramuggus. It was a very good, very rustic feeling, which I attribute to the breeze, the lack of the electric field and the dopamine high from having just finished the article.

As a kid, at the lake, everything was perfect. It was summer and I could jump in the water. On any given Sunday there were aunts, uncles and cousins galore, from both sides of the family. Dad was grilling steaks and sweet corn. There was a hammock strung between the trees and watermelon on the picnic table.

Vermont was also perfect. I was connected to the community through my buddy Chris. I had what he boasted was "the sweetest piece of land in Vermont," 153 acres with brooks, ponds, and awesome geology, including a 90-foot cliff, all of it surrounded by 10s of thousands more acres of wilderness.

Being present is not wanting to be anywhere else. Richness, Rabbi Hillel observed, has everything to do with feeling satisfied. I've recently written about how our connection to globalized media changes for the worse our relationship with the local. Having too many choices leading to dissatisfaction. Too many possibilities overshadow what actually is. Living off grid, disconnecting from the modern world, intentionally or when the power goes off for an extended period of time, allows other, truer, more primal connections to be revealed. It's a kind of meditation.

Saturday at noon, when the power finally came back on here in San Luis Rey, I admit I felt grateful for the return of the modern world. But as when returning to Connecticut from Vermont, a bit of the wilderness stayed with me. All things considered, I prefer living out here on the periphery.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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