Fear Not!

Yesterday, I received an email from an old California friend who moved to Whidbey Island about six months ago. We’ve been trying to find a time to go visit her, but it’s been hard what with one scheduled event or another. She writes that they will be in residence in December unless they have called a moving van by then, responding to their neighbors’ warnings of fearful power blackouts and gray skies and relentless rain. I doubt if she is actually thinking that there will be any call to the moving company or is fearful of gray skies or rain because she is a stalwart trouper, but I think that is how people feel that city people are likely to respond to life in the rural (or sort of rural) northwest. It is true that there are regular power outages, it is true that the skies are really gray in these dark months, it is true that it rains a lot (this morning, for example, when it was hard to believe that anything but staying in one’s pajamas, in one’s bed, in one’s bedroom, with one's engaging novel ought to be happening, never mind those scheduled events on one’s calendar.

Still, you can buy a generator if you are too worried about losing power; and you can put up some cheerful LED light strings and buy sunlight-corrected light bulbs to fend off the gray days, and you can buy a nice raincoat or a sturdy umbrella for the rainy days. It’s not like living in, say, Minnesota in the winter after all. It’s not dangerous. Hardly anyone I know has a generator, when it comes to the fact. A friend who lives on Salt Spring Island just bought one because there, he says, they have periods of a week without electricity, and if it’s going to be a week, you are going to lose whatever is in the freezer. That’s a reason not to live on Salt Spring Island, maybe, but it’s not a reason not to live on the mainland, where the power, at least in my 16 years up here, has never been off more than 48 hours, which a refrigerator/freezer can manage if you are not opening it all the time. In neither Point Roberts nor on the Sunshine Coast are we in danger of flooding from excess rain because everything runs very quickly into the ground, down the ditches, and into the ocean. We don’t have local rivers that overflow. (Flooding can (and does) happen from the ocean, of course, if the tides are high and the wind is strong and from the wrong direction, but even that is pretty much restricted to houses proximate to the beach. And that’s a reason not to live too close to the beach, I guess.)

Overall, however, there’s not much to worry about, or at least not much that is within one’s control (as contrasted with, say, earthquakes). I don’t know what will be the effect on the northwest if the Big Three auto companies fold, but I don’t suppose that any of us has much to say about that outcome. But this is life in the time of fear, which has become the U.S. brand; but it’s also life in the time of a big belief in personal control of one’s life. We’d be better off it were Life in the Time of Stoicism. The Stoics thought that the goal of life was to live in agreement with nature. I’m pretty sure that would include gray skies, lots of rain, and power outages. Californians! City People! Be Not Afraid!