The Endgame

Newsletter #21 - Lineman for the County

This newsletter looks at issues and events from the endgame point of view. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Player options are limited and diminishing.

Toronto, April 21, 2023

Lineman for the County

When my father was a young man trying to make a living in post-war London, he had a friend called Mendoza who lived on the brink of bankruptcy. Periodically the London Electricity Board would cut off the electricity supply to Mendoza’s office because he hadn’t paid the bill. When that happened, Mendoza would appear, distraught, in the entrance to my father’s nearby office, and shout aggrievedly, “They’ve cut off my power!”

For some reason my father found this highly amusing. For ever afterwards, for half-a-century, with Mendoza long forgotten, and my father living in Canada, he would occasionally, suddenly, for no apparent reason, wandering through his house, or walking down the street, shout “They’ve cut off my power!” I like to think these were his last words before he died suddenly of a heart attack.

People who live in the city don’t think much about electricity. It’s just there. But it’s different in the country. In the country, electricity cannot be assumed. The power gets cut off all the time. Electricity is an iffy proposition.

My wife and I live part of the year in a Nova Scotia fishing village. Tree branches hang over power lines. Powerful nor’easters blow regularly. Hurricanes trundle up the coast from June to November. Wild animals climb onto power transformers. The electricity distribution system is not robust. Power outages are common. Some last a long time. Up to a week, even.

You wake up in the morning and reach over to turn on the bedside lamp. Nothing happens. The power’s out. That means no water (the well has an electric pump). No coffee. No shower. No toilet flushing. No internet. No browsing the newspapers on your iPad. No heat. No light. No cooking. The refrigerator will soon start defrosting...

You check the charge of your mobile phone. You wonder, is there any gasoline for the emergency generator? If you can get the generator going, noisy and spewing noxious fumes, it will at least run the water pump and stop the fridge from defrosting until the gasoline is gone. You wish you’d filled up the bath when you noticed the lights flickering last night; had you been paying attention, this morning you’d be able to flush the toilet using bathwater.

You slowly heat a saucepan of water on the wood stove. You smash coffee beans with a mallet because you forgot to grind them yesterday. You call the power company and ask a robot when the power will be restored; the robot is vague.

The village waits for the County lineman. Most people hang out in the fire hall which has powerful generators; there’s hot food there, friendly people, you can charge your phone, and, best of all, commiserate with your neighbours and speculate about when the power will be back. One time the army even showed up to help fix things. That was after Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

A couple of days later, I wake up in the middle of the night and look out of the window at the sea. I see lights in the village across the estuary. The power is back. In the morning there will be coffee, a hot shower, and newspapers on my iPad. Civilization has been restored. It hangs by a thread.

P.S. My new book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics.  Listen to my conversation with Andrew Keen.