Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Forest fires. Volcano eruptions. In the parlance of lawyers and claims adjusters, these inconvenient events are commonly referred to as Acts of God. To this list I’d add Christmas holiday storms, though it strikes me as odd that God would act so cruelly on the cusp of one His most cherished celebrations
Electrical service crews worked around the clock in attempts to restore power in the wake of last week’s powerful winter storm. Dan King photo
This must be the God of the Old Testament, angry and testy, ready to smite his creation when we’re acting up, as we usually are, waging war, upending democracy, heating up the planet, or – Heaven forbid – giving Uncle Harry a battling nun puppet for Christmas.
Joking aside, this recent storm was no joke. Especially if you were one of the poor souls attempting to travel while in its frigid grip. Thousands of flight cancellations and delays. Unnavigable highways and byways. Power outages. Freezing cold houses and apartments and, worse of all, no internet! For almost two days! How would we survive?
For my wife and me, it was Panera Bread. We basically set up camp there. Coffee, food, warmth, Wi-Fi, human companionship. It was the modern equivalent of a prehistoric cave with a roaring fire. I was so happy there I was ready to pay them rent to allow me to stay.
As for lost power, The Great Satan in these events is always Central Maine Power. When the power goes off you curse them endlessly, mercilessly, as if it’s their fault all those 19-century knuckleheads made the disastrous decision to run electrical wires above ground, hanging them defenselessly on so-called telephone poles, rather than burying them safely six feet underground. Where was Elon Musk when we really needed him?
And just when you’re ready to firebomb CMP’s head office, you see their titanic trucks and their stalwart staff out in the cold, in the dark, in the dangerous weather, risking life and limb so you can watch “The White Lotus” comfortably on TV. On Christmas Eve morning, when my wife and I drove out of our coastal village (heading for Panera, of course) we encountered a literal armada of electrical service trucks (seriously, a couple dozen of them, from as far away as Georgia and Mississippi) lined up and ready to battle fallen trees, snapped lines and broken poles. The elation we felt may have rivaled the French people’s jubilation when the Allied Forces marched victoriously into Paris near the end of WWII.
Suddenly The Great Satan was The Great Savior. You go, CMP! We love you, man!
I read a newspaper article that the origins of this storm were based in a circling cold air mass over the northernmost region of our planet. Oh, no! Now the North Pole is implicated. First God, now Santa. What’s the world – the universe – coming to?
We humans take ourselves, and our trials, too seriously. We are part of a system, a global ecology, that doesn’t factor our selfish wants and needs into its manifestations. We are but one piece of the puzzle. Probably the piece that never quite fits or gets lost under the coffee table.
Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.
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