Friday, September 12, 2003
The Blackout of 2003
Where were you when the lights went out? I’ll tell you where I was, and it begins as a story of sorrow: I was seated at the computer in my office on campus, applying the finishing touches to a brilliant, funny, yet searingly honest Michiana Chronicles essay, a singular masterpiece, a theme like one a really great writer might invent on his lucky day—ah, but I’d failed to save the document, and I knew, given my absolute reliance on technology, that my memory wouldn’t retain any of the zippy prose that had rattled off my fingertips that afternoon in the downpour of my brainstorm. I’d been struck by lightning—the metaphorical kind—only moments before the power transformer also was fried by the electrical kind.
So I need a moment to tell you about my lost essay. It managed the trick (the magic, really) of celebrating the mysterious goodness of humanity in the midst of discovering the hidden beauty of northern Indiana (Mishawaka, to be precise) and plumbing the underwater depths of the American psyche while also taking a kind-spirited little slap at the Bush administration that, while ultimately devastating, rang so true that even my most ardent detractors would be forced to shake their heads and laugh in a resigned and bitter-sweet way. I somehow managed to work a goat into the essay, too—don’t ask me how exactly—and the image had a haunting effect. I can still feel it. Okay, imagine a shaggy goat, tall and alone, outlined against a blue, gray October sky.... Oh, forget it.... I can’t recapture that image now. It’s lost forever!
Right after the lights went out, a security officer shouted down the hallway for everyone immediately to dash down to the ground floor auditorium. I looked up from my blank screen and for the first time noticed through the window the weird green glow of the horizon beneath a heavy black blotting of low clouds. Tornado weather. This looked to be a violent storm, and I wondered if we would all survive it. Already it had wiped out at least one perfectly good essay.
From the stairwell I took I could view the sky through the wide glass. Several of my colleagues were en route with me. We heard the wind lashing through the trees and the rain strafing the windows. Students and teachers were gathering in the auditorium, which was illuminated only faintly by emergency lights. I persuaded myself that the large room was specially reinforced, and that when the structure above us had tumbled to the ground like a child’s building blocks, we would remain safe in our cage awaiting rescue. Workers would come with cranes and steam shovels and dig us out of the rubble. When they had opened a little hole into the room they would hear us singing songs in the round to cheer ourselves. I would be at the front of the auditorium, smiling my reassuring smile and leading the boisterous sing-along that kept our hearts riding high through the storm, the terrible storm that had destroyed my essay. But at least we had survived.
It was at just this point in my fantasy that the same security officer from before grabbed hold of my shoulder and gently shook me. I looked up, and the place was deserted, except for him—and me, still crouched on the floor, rocking back and forth, hugging myself and crying in a small voice, “It’s okay! It’s okay!,” as if to reassure myself in the absence of any parental authority. The electricity was still out, but the storm had passed, and I could go home. Home? What meaning could that word have now? Could Dorothy really go home after Oz? Would there ever be light again, for us, for me?
No. The blackout continues, even now. The world is goatless. The never-printed pages of my lost essay blow and skid through the greater darkness, and are taken up, up into the funnel of oblivion.