Generators, Percolators, and Great English Novelists
English novelist Jane Austen was born the seventh of eight children in the village rectory of Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775. Over the course of her brief life, she witnessed political unrest, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Reign of Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, and industrialization. Her novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—had been written, revised, and published by the time of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo (1815). She died in 1818—two years after the birth of Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre.
Austen and the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Ann—wrote in an age when electricity did not exist, just as it did not during the final week of 2021 and first week of 2022 here in Nevada County, CA. When one lives in the Sierra Foothills above the snowline and experiences an extensive, extended, record-breaking winter storm, things begin to happen with a domino effect that changes life as it has been.
On Monday, December 27, Kit and I awoke to a world of tall pines and firs dressed in white. As the snow continued to blanket the region over the following three days, tree branches buckled, power poles snapped, power lines dangled, and the world went eerily silent and dark. A week later, over 50,000 PG&E customers were still without power, internet service, or mail deliveries. And for one 24-hour period, no one had cellular service.
On the final day of December when the world was preparing to watch the ball drop in Times Square, PG&E notified customers via text messages that downed trees and damage to powerlines had been extensive. A countywide state of emergency was declared. Those who ventured out on icy roads reported that some streets at lower elevations near the downtown looked like combat zones. An emergency center at the Nevada County Library opened for residents in need of power for medical equipment, access to Wi-Fi, and emergency supplies like blankets and food.
Life as Kit and I have known it over the past eight months was suddenly reduced to a scale that has come to feel like a tiny 18th century English village. Neighbors share updates from power and cellular companies and Waste Management pickup schedules, and speculate on when mail and newspaper deliveries might once again bring news from the outside world.
Last summer during Northern California’s devastating fire season, we purchased a bright orange Generac generator that looks like the Star Wars character R2D2 and a 4-gallon gas can that we keep filled with high-octane fuel. And we’ve learned how to set the choke, pull the power cord, and run the generator for periods of time during the morning and evening hours. In addition, we have a good supply of battery-powered candles and AA batteries on hand that we purchased during the Christmas holidays.
One of the blessings of our location four miles up a long winding road from Nevada City’s historic Broad Street is that we are on city and water. A green cast iron fireplace located at the center of our open design living room/dining room circulates warmth at the flip of a wall switch and stays on day and night. We sleep with the generator off to conserve fuel and wake up in pre-dawn darkness with flashlights and battery-powered candles to guide us around the house until dawn and the generator brings a return of light.
Around 5:30 a.m. I light a match to ignite a burner on the stove and fire up our Revere Ware coffee percolator. Kit sets out a couple of Gingersnaps or biscotti and we head for the living room for coffee and conversation. In that early morning meditation, we look out our high front windows at 3 ½ feet of snow on the deck and the firs and pines that fill the woods at our border.
Meals are cooked on our gas stovetop. For breakfast, the menu has included oatmeal, egg omelets, avocado toast, French toast with bacon and blueberries, and my father’s recipe for pancakes with sour cream and buttermilk. For lunches that last several days, I make soups in my Mother’s big copper pot. The winner has been a soup made with Rancho Gordo French cassoulet white runner beans, bourbon sausage, carrots, celery, and onions. It made enough for us to enjoy and share with neighbors.
Friends and family have been wonderfully generous and helpful. Pete and his young son Anders appeared five times during the course of the storm on a Quad with a plow attached to the front to clear mountains for snow and ice from our steep driveway. His wife Katie invited us to use their washing machine and take warm showers. Carol and Jim are always at the ready to help me manually shovel ice and snow from the bottom of the driveway after city snowplows shove snow from the road that mounds up at the foot of the driveway all over again. Friend John who installed our generator checks upon us and our daughter Heidi runs errands to and from town when we need to restock supplies. We are all in this together.
In the early morning and evening hours, Kit and I read to each other or watch a DVD with generator power. Currently, we’re reading our way through our Austen and Brontë library. Their classic late 18th and early 19th century tales reflect scenes and characters penned on paper during daylight hours and by candlelight at night. As these extraordinary novelists gathered after dinner with the family around a blazing hearth, they read their daily installments to their works in progress aloud by candlelight. Gradually their tales grew into the great novels that we continue to read and reread today—much as Kit and I have been doing while living off the as 2021 quietly came to an end and as 2022 slowly gets underway.