Partial Restoration

I wrote this post earlier this morning, but had no way to post it, since I still have no internet:

I sit here writing on this desk that was damaged by Hurricane Irma, almost exactly 2 weeks to the day and time we lost power in Hurricane Helene. What’s remarkable about that sentence is that we went through Hurricane Helene in the mountains of North Carolina.

We are just south of Asheville, so we have been spared the worst. We did go without electricity for two weeks, and we still can’t drink our water right out of the tap. But water does come out of the tap, and we can flush the toilets without a bucket. We still don’t have house internet restored, but the phone can work as a hot spot.

If I didn’t live so much of my life online, with classes that I teach and classes that I’m taking for seminary, this might have been an enjoyable time off. But I’ve needed to have an internet connection almost daily, so twice I’ve gone to a friend’s house in Columbia, SC to stay for 48 hours, and this week, my local church, Lutheran Church of the Nativity, opened up their fellowship hall from 10-2 to offer the community a place to charge devices, free wi-fi, and free water, both drinkable and not. It’s been a great service to members and the community.

As I reflect on our experience, I’m realizing how many parts of our lives have prepared us for these weeks that have been somewhat off the grid. We’ve kept some of our hurricane supplies and equipment, like the French press coffee pot. When we remodeled the kitchen, we chose a gas stove, thinking that if the power went off in an ice storm, we could still cook or heat water. Through the years, we’ve lived in various houses in various states of remodel and those experiences have given us skills in doing without modern conveniences.

I will be the first to admit that I did not take this storm seriously, and I won’t make that mistake again. It was my spouse who filled up our first round of water containers and captured rain water in every five gallon bucket he could find. We had both cars full of gas, but that was a fluke. I thought I’d be commuting, and I wanted to fill our cars up on Wednesday night, not Thursday when it would be raining. We had some cash on hand; we’d have had more if I hadn’t spent it at the farmer’s market a week earlier. It was a fluke that we had it at all.

Today I return to work at Spartanburg Methodist College. This past week, both the schools where I teach were closed due to different hurricanes, and today they will both be open.. Tomorrow we make the trip to Bristol, and then on Sunday, from Bristol I go to DC for the onground intensive week for two of my seminary classes. I hate that I will be missing my onground classes for a week so soon after this long hurricane break, but it can’t be helped. I had planned to spend this past week getting the students prepped for my week away, but now I’ll have them write about their hurricane experience.