Trees, 1,000; Teaneck, Zip

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—3/22/10—I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep anymore! I’m typing this in the dark, and my PC’s battery is rapidly dying!

We’re in Night Four of The Great Bergen County Blackout of 2010, and we’ve been without electricity, food, clean water and, most crucially, heat, along with thousands of others hereabouts, since #@$& Saturday, when the massive trees of Teaneck, Englewood and Bergenfield (etc., etc.) decided to take out their respective towns.

The only warmish place in this entire house, for four long days, has been in the bed (with my husband, aka The Devil Bat, when he’s home from the city), and I am sick unto death of lying in bed, wearing an ensemble that can only be described as a cross between a child’s sleeping bag and a member of the Taliban.

Yes, I am dressed in, not as, a Talib: a Talib of the “Pastel Taliban”—a splinter faction given more to sleepovers and cheerleading clinics than violence.

I am wearing a pale blue Lands End ski hat; a 1990’s-vintage J Crew shirt and Lands End sweater; a huge, pale green scarf; an XXL pale green down vest; Yoga leggings; an ecru Gaiam nightgown; polka-dot gloves; and hospital socks (with non-skid soles: turquoise).

The Devil Bat is wearing less, but only by a fraction: microfiber pants; socks; a Fossil sweatshirt (bright orange); a huge magenta turtleneck; and my other Lands End hat, inside-out, I might add. (He resembles Papa John, of The Mamas & The Papas, c. 1969.)

I suppose married couples in other blackouts might consider whiling away the dull, dark, frigid hours making whoopee: we, on the other hand, have on way too many clothes for such activities. . .and I’m not taking mine off. Period. It’s 49 degrees in our bedroom.

For about an hour on Saturday night, when the hurricane hit town (following  upon the heels of the winter’s several segue-ing blizzards), we thought we might escape. We were right in the middle of watching “House,” and were chilly enough already. What Teaneck doesn’t extract from us in the guise of property taxes, PSE&G carts away for power, gas, and water. Teaneck, a sleeper dormitory for New York City, is one expensive place to call home: our thermostat was already turned way, way down.

The lights flickered; the cable died; transformers exploded around us greenly in the sky (this backward burb of ours still features power lines atop creaky wooden poles) . . . and then all hell broke loose. Some 1,000 trees and power poles toppled . . . onto people, people in cars, houses, public buildings, etc., over the course of that first night and the next day. The rains came down with the trees: some people’s homes flooded unto the second floor. And thousands, over a hundred thousand in the tri-state area, were left in the dark and the cold.

When I lived in Athens, Greece, where nothing works precisely as it was designed to work in the First World, I got used to power outages; freezing cold, pitch-black apartment buildings, stranded elevators. My usual winter sleeping attire always resembled what I’m wearing here now as I type: just about everything warm and soft I had in the apartment.

The ex-pat community used to call one another up during strikes and outages to discuss our sartorial choices for the night.

It was fun, sort of, 25 years ago.

Not so fun now, at this age: my lumbar spine and arthritic paws are not amused. Nor fun in a country the Republicans keep touting as the most advanced on the planet. Yeah, let them try getting by with what passes for my health care here.

And where, %$# &^%$ it, Mr. Obama, is the National Guard!!!!

For four days, I waited for someone to come block a street off here in Teaneck where a shattered, leaning power pole is threatening to come down, at any moment, across the street, which borders a park (full of kids out of school).

I collared two PSE&G trucks, an ABC news crew and, finally, this evening, phoneless, drove over to the Teaneck Police station to tell them it would be on their heads when that pole came crashing down on someone else’s: the street, Palisades Avenue, was closed off within the hour.

On the way over to the station, I passed two cruisers at a busy, traffic-light-less corner near the local hospital. Oh, yes, the policemen were in their cars; but they should jolly well have been directing traffic. Manually. Out in the street. Preventing the chaos taking place just in front of them. (Young, agile National Guards-people needed on the corner of Teaneck and Cedar Lane, please!)

In rural South Carolina, that shattered pole of which I speak would have been shored up and repaired, by volunteer firemen if necessary, within an hour of its shattering.

In Atlanta, those power lines would be buried underground.

Considering the property taxes we shell out here, and the utility rates, all I have to say is that I feel as though New Jersey, in its entirety, is stuck in a 1950’s time warp. And the money—in Trenton; and in Albany, too—just vanishes into the usual pockets, while we, out here in Formerly Middle Class Land, are left footing the bill . . . for zip.

I’m going back to bed now. PSE&G told The Devil Bat, earlier in the day, that they expect we’ll have power by Thursday evening. I’m not holding my breath.

And the Pastel Taliban? Well, we might have to change our peaceable tactics, and march on our state capitals. If all those without power in Bergen County look and feel anything like I do these days, we may just scare them into handling our hard-earned money better. Infrastructure, as Rachel Maddow is wont to say: Infrastructure, You Blithering Idiots!

And bring home the National Guard! War on Terror? They’re needed for the War on Trees.

(PS On Thursday, the power did, finally, come back on. Electricians from Ohio restored it on our particular street. With the power, arrived bills for the month from both PSE&G and the water company. Nice timing, folks.)