Our 12-year-old dog, Boise, is afraid of power outages. Like, hide-under-a-pillow afraid.
It's taken me a while to figure out that Boise is fearful of silence. It makes him shiver and run for cover.
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You don't realize how much ambient noise there is in a house until the electricity shuts off. As I write this, I can hear the white-noise machine in the bedroom, the exhaust fan in the bathroom, the sound of water swishing in the dishwasher and a muffled conversation coming from the TV in the family room.
When everything goes quiet all at once because of an electric outage, the silence is deafening. For our nervous boy, Boise, it's too much.
If I'm in my recliner when the power goes off, he will curl up in a ball between my knees. If I'm in bed, he will lie on my head. If I'm working, he will lie on the floor on a blanket.
With all the windy weather we've had recently, we've had a couple of power outages in my mountain neighborhood. A hardwood tree fell across the street and boinked off our transformer, causing a temporary power interruption. A few days later, a bigger tree fell across a road about a half-mile from our house and knocked out power to about 150 homes. I know the count because of EPB's handy online outage map that tracks the location and status of every problem.
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One day when the power went out, my 17-year-old son and I were sitting in our dining room, which was lighted by a big double window.
He'd been driving his truck down the street and returned to report that a tree had fallen and cut through power lines like wet spaghetti.
"It's going to be a while before they get that fixed," he said, confidently.
"Yeah, that's not a 30-minute job," I agreed.
To pass time, we sat and talked for about 30 minutes about boy stuff: the high price of truck tires, the NFL games coming up, what sounded good for dinner. It felt like sitting on the front porch at my grandmother's house back in the day.
Had the power been on, we both would have been screen zombies. He would have been sequestered in his room playing on his phone, and I would been pecking away at the keyboard building a newspaper column.
Technically, I could have been working: using my battery powered laptop and relying on my iPhone internet hot spot. Instead, I shut it down for a moment to spend time with my favorite 17-year-old.
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We were stuck with each other until the power came back on.
That's when the idea hit me: Maybe we'd be better people if the power went off randomly for an hour or two a week. It's about the only thing that would reliably break our screen habits.
Sure, we could all just make a New Year's resolution to put away our devices for a spell, but there's nothing more cleansing — or definitive — than a house without electric current.
I suppose there are people who depend on electrical medical devices that would be put at risk if we had these rolling blackouts. And there's no sense inconveniencing people who live alone, or the elderly.
But for the rest of us, I think these weekly random blackouts would be good news. I'm aware that in much of the developing world, 24/7 electricity is not a given, but a gift.
But sometimes a dark house can lead to a light heart.
And that's a good thing.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.