Three counties is not a number

At 5:50 a.m. I sat in the car with the key at ACC and the radio on, because the house has no other receiver. The fuel needle was under the 1/8 mark. I gave the radio eleven minutes and turned it off.

Eleven minutes in the car

ACC, not ON. ON runs the blower and leaves the ignition circuit live. ACC runs the radio and the lighter socket, and it still pulls on the battery. I watched the dash lights dim at the nine-minute mark.

The AM band had one station I could hold, from the town 40 km east. At 6:00 it ran 90 seconds of news: the ice, the outage, a request not to call 911 about the power. No cause. No crew count. No time. At 6:40 the same 90 seconds came again, word for word. That told me the station had nothing new, not that nothing had changed.

I put my hand on the key to start the engine, then took it off. The tank is under 1/8, and idle minutes come out of fuel I may need later. I wrote it on the sheet: 11 min radio, 0 min idle, battery unverified. The car was 3 °C inside. I scraped a hole in the windscreen the size of my hand.

At 7:10 the dog got up off the floor, walked past me, and took the warm spot on the bed I had just left. He is 30 kg and he has slept about 20 hours a day since the second night. She was awake by then, doing her hair at the kitchen table with a hand mirror, half a cup of water and no rinse. I had already counted that half cup in my head as waste, on a morning when we have 18 L. I did not say it out loud. I am writing it down because I thought it. Then I made a joke about the radio being the only voice in the house. She said "mm" and kept pinning.

The radio that takes four D cells

At 8:20 I went across the street and borrowed the radio. He handed it over with 4 D cells in it and 4 spare, and counted them out loud in front of me. I wrote 8 on the sheet.

A battery radio works when a phone does not, because of the number of links. A radio needs a transmitter with power of its own and 4 D cells. A phone needs its own battery, a tower in range, power at that tower, and the network behind it. Four links, and I controlled one.

I timed the cells. On low volume 8:30 to 11:00, off, on for the noon news, off, on at 5:00 p.m. That is 3 hours 20 minutes, and the cells were still going at 10:00 p.m. Volume matters.

The woman two doors down has a wind-up radio as well as the torch. I wound it for 2 minutes and it played the noon bulletin and died in the weather. Two minutes bought about 12 minutes of radio.

Why the phone stopped first

My phone died at 9:20 p.m. on the first night with 4 percent left, and I have not charged it since. So the notifications stopped for the simplest reason: the battery went. That is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is what happens if the phone is charged. Alerts travel over the cell network as a short message with a sound and a vibration, twice. None of that helps if the tower has no power, and its battery is not sized for a week. Nobody has told me the number.

I tested the network with his phone at 10:40 a.m. One bar in the kitchen. "SOS only" at the front window. Two bars at the top of the stairs, and the call would not complete. Three positions, no working call. The network was not down everywhere. It was down here. For 2 hours that morning I did not know whether the water was coming back or whether the town had an announcement out. I found out by walking 1.4 km.

Three counties is not a number

The store was open 9:00 to 4:00 on a generator, cash only, and there were 5 people inside for a floor that holds 30. I bought nothing. The water had taken most of the $11.

What I heard, in the order I heard it:

• "The whole of three counties is out." From the man at the counter, who had it from his brother.
• "They're saying three more days." From a woman by the cooler, who did not say who they were.
• "The crews are coming from Ottawa." No source offered.

Three sentences, and not one was a number I could use. Three counties is a shape on a map. It does not say how many customers are off, what broke, how many crews are working, or when my street comes back. A confirmed number has a customer count, a cause, a crew count and a date. I had none of the four.

I checked what I could. From the top of the stairs I counted 14 houses on my street and 0 with a light on. At 11:20 I watched 2 hydro trucks heading east on Highway 7.

Then I made the mistake of the day. I walked home past her house and told her the power would be back in three days. I said it as a fact, because that is how it reached me. She had been carrying water from the rain barrel in 2 L amounts since the second day. She stopped, because the barrel had 12 L and three days was a long time.

Here is the part I keep going back to. When the woman by the cooler said three days, my shoulders came down half an inch before I decided anything. The relief came first and went looking for a reason, and the reason it found was one sentence from a stranger. I have done that before. I have wanted a thing and treated the wanting as evidence, and some of those things I pray about. I said the same three sentences at night this week that I have said for years. On the fourth night I added one asking for a date. That is the first time I have put a date in it. I do not think the asking was wrong. I think I did not see the difference between believing a thing and knowing it until I watched it cost an old woman 12 L of rainwater.

Three days was not a fact. It was one woman by a cooler repeating a sentence with no owner. I went back at 4:30, told her I had no reason to say it, and carried 8 L up her steps. She was polite about it, which was worse.

The sheet has 4 columns now: time, source, what was said, confirmed. It runs to 11 rows, with 3 question marks. Row 7 is mine and it says "narrator, no source, wrong." Below it I did the arithmetic for a month, because the number was coming anyway. At 8.6 L a day, 14 L is 1.6 days, and there is no second source inside 2 km. A month is 258 L. I have 14. I wrote three lines instead of a plan: water I can walk to, heat that is not the car, and stop pretending I am keeping the whole house.

Water: 18 L at 6:00 a.m., 14 L now. Four litres used: 3 drunk between us, 1 for the dog. That is 1.5 L each against my own 2 L a person, so I banked 4 L by under-drinking. I will pay for that tomorrow.

What I should have had on day zero

• A battery radio in this house with 8 D cells, instead of borrowing one on the sixth morning.
• A card with the 3 AM frequencies that carry the county and the times their news runs.
• A charged power bank rated for 3 phone charges, so the phone lasts 4 days instead of 1.
• A notebook with a ruled source column, so a rumour cannot sit in a fact's row.
• Half a tank and a 20 L jerry can, not a quarter tank and nothing.