The long, winding road to Denmark


A festive business dinner in Denmark with a technology team from the San Francisco Chronicle and employees of the Danish company CCI International. That’s me in the black shirt, second from the right. The year is 2002.

The curmudgeon H.L. Mencken left us a rich legacy of fine quotes. One of his best is about Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” Mencken is entirely right. A moral suspicion of happiness and a duty to endure earthly misery “to lay up treasures in heaven” is a theological proposition that is inseparable from all forms of Christianity, whether Catholicism, Protestant Calvinism, or fundamentalism. Evangelicals who pursue “prosperity theology” do make one and only one exception. That exception is for rich people, who get to lay up their treasures on earth as well as in heaven.

I have been thinking about Denmark lately because Paul Krugman has mentioned Denmark in two of his recent columns. One column is about the misconceptions of conservatives. The other column is about “fanatical centrists.”

Krugman on conservatives’ horror of what they call “socialism”:

“What Americans who support ‘socialism’ actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

“And in case you haven’t been there, the Nordic countries are not, in fact, hellholes. They have somewhat lower G.D.P. per capita than we do, but that’s largely because they take more vacations. Compared with America, they have higher life expectancy, much less poverty and significantly higher overall life satisfaction. Oh, and they have high levels of entrepreneurship — because people are more willing to take the risk of starting a business when they know that they won’t lose their health care or plunge into abject poverty if they fail.”

Krugman on the perpetual wrongness of fanatical centrists:

“But I’m not talking about the left. Radical leftists are virtually nonexistent in American politics; can you think of any prominent figure who wants us to move to the left of, say, Denmark? No, I’m talking about fanatical centrists.”

It’s a standing joke — with a lot of truth in it — that travel turns people into liberal Democrats. American conservatives can get away with lying about Europe and the Nordic countries because so many conservative voters know so little about the world. You can find many sources on the Internet that compare how Americans vote to whether they have a passport, for example, here. I will not concede that my saying such a thing amounts to economic snobbery. Many of my rural, Trump-loving neighbors drive enormous, gas-guzzling vehicles that cost more than $50,000. Many of my rural, Trump-loving neighbors also have enormous travel trailers that can be pulled only by enormous trucks. The median household income of Trump supporters in the 2016 primaries was about $72,000, well above the national median of $56,000.

Ignorance of the world is a choice.

Before I retired, I did business for some years with a Danish company that builds publishing systems for newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle (where I worked). I have made two business trips to Denmark. It is remarkable what the Nordic countries have accomplished. They always rank near the top of lists that measure happiness, trust, equality, and civic freedoms. Meanwhile, the United States is moving backwards, like other places in the world where the rich call the shots. Increasingly, though Europe has its own troubles, Europe feels like a refuge from American backsliding. It’s no wonder that so many people talk — maybe only half seriously — about leaving the United States. A recent Gallup poll found that a record number of Americans want to get out. The reason: Trump.

My recent trip to Scotland has made me resolve to get to Europe more often, though considerable frugalities and economies are necessary to make travel affordable on my fixed retirement income. Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh back in August, Ken asked me if I was culture-shocked. Heck no, I said. I feel more at home here than I do at home. I meant it, too.

Still, I am not ready to throw in the towel on the United States. I am reluctant to make predictions, but, so far — especially now that Democrats have retaken the U.S. House of Representatives and the law takes it course — I believe we are approaching peak Trump. Trump is going to be brought down by the law, taking the Republican Party with him. Americans insisted on finding out the hard way (we liberals tried to warn them!) what billionaires and Republicans do when they get power. Rural white voters will continue to glorify a hell largely of their own making. But voters in the American suburbs, in the 2018 election, showed their remorse for falling for Trump in 2016. That won’t happen again. California and New York are leading the way. The suburbs are coming to their senses. Boomers will soon be leaving the world in droves, just as they entered. Young people see the world in a very different way. All roads now lead to Denmark. And we will all be happier for it.

Note: The Mencken quote is sometimes given as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.” I don’t know which is more accurate.

Apple butter brownies

My usual vehicles for chocolate fixes are 72 percent dark chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Last week, I ran out — a rare occurrence. That left me to figure out what to do with cocoa (which I always have) that would provide a chocolate fix with a minimum of carbs.

The first experiment yielded dry, uninteresting brownies. I realized that, if you reduce the amount of fat and sugar, the brownies are no fun. Then I thought of apple sauce (or apple butter). It was easy to make that connection because my favorite cake since childhood is a chocolate apple sauce cake in which the only liquid ingredient is apple sauce. There aren’t even any eggs in the cake. The pectin in apple sauce is a remarkably good replacement for eggs.

I actually made a recipe:

1 cup barley flour

1 cup apple butter

1 egg

1/4 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup cocoa

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup olive oil

For the flour, substitute whole wheat flour or any flour. Apple sauce or apple butter would work equally well. Honey or even molasses would work as well as maple syrup. Any kind of oil, or even butter, could be substituted for the olive oil.

Mix everything together and pour the batter into an oiled 8-inch baking pan. My brownies needed about 25 minutes at 350 degrees. They’re done as soon as they pass the toothpick test.

I wouldn’t say that these brownies are chewy, exactly. But they’re very moist and satisfying. They’re also cheaper than chocolate bars.

For your worry list, with apologies

Raven Rock: The Story of the Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die, by Garrett Graff. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War. National Academy of Sciences Press, 1986.

Our worry lists are long. As a friend recently said in email, “…[W]e probably all have a limited capacity for despair.” This is true. But I respectfully submit that the risk of thermonuclear war ought to be (once again) on our worry lists, and on the international agenda. Many analysts are warning us that the risks of thermonuclear war are growing.

Just yesterday, Politico carried a piece by Sam Nunn and Ernest J. Moniz, The U.S. and Russia Are Sleepwalking Toward Nuclear Disaster.

For more detail from a higher altitude, consider this New Yorker piece from last year: The Growing Dangers of the Nuclear Arms Race.

In December 2018, Russia said that it has successfully tested a new hypersonic weapons-delivery missile that flies 27 times faster than the speed of sound. Such a missile would render current defenses useless. The United States is working on hypersonic missiles, but Russia seems to be in the lead on this.

Two days ago, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. is withdrawing from a 1987 treaty on nuclear forces. Yesterday, Russia’s President Putin said that Russia also is withdrawing from the treaty. Today, the story about the treaty is still on the opening page of the Washington Post’s web site, but Trump’s wall is played much higher on the page. This is a media failure as well as a potentially catastrophic failure of leadership. We are arguing about absurd political distractions such as Trump’s wall while ignoring actual existential threats such as thermonuclear war and climate disaster.

Sheer craziness is on the rise in worldwide leadership. Both Trump and Putin are anti-NATO. New nuclear weapons are coming on line, and other new weapons and delivery systems are not far off. The idea that “tactical” nuclear weapons can be deployed in limited ways is gaining advocates if not credibility. International tensions are high. Many things could go wrong.

Raven Rock is a well done history of the Cold War. It’s a miracle that we have survived this many decades without nuclear weapons being accidentally deployed. There have been many close calls.

For example, in 1979, NORAD’s computers reported that hundreds of missiles — a full-scale nuclear attack — were headed this way from Russia, aimed at a full list of American targets including military targets and cities. Underground American command-and-control facilities closed their blast doors and tried to figure out what to do, with only minutes to respond. Bombers and interceptors were scrambled. Missile silos were ordered to prepare to fire. The Strategic Air Command’s ranking officer on that shift, Colonel Billy Batson, saved civilization by doubting that the attack was real. He ordered telephone contact with the watch officer in Fort Richie, Maryland, which radar said would be one of the first places hit. They counted down the seconds until destruction. But nothing happened. SAC stood down and went to work to figure out what had happened. What had happened was that someone had put a training tape into the actual early warning system. This event helped inspire the 1983 film “WarGames” starring Matthew Broderick. There have been many other close calls.

Whatever the risks of accidental nuclear war, the risk of intentional use of nuclear weapons is increasing. Last year, the United States actually lowered the threshold for use of nuclear weapons. The use of “tactical” nuclear weapons is increasingly tempting, because of the idea that the use of nuclear weapons can be limited, without leading to all-out mutually assured destruction.

In the early decades of the Cold War, there was an effort to help the civilian population survive thermonuclear war. It was a given that millions would die, but the idea was that recovery would be quicker if enough of the population survived to restore industry, etc. Most of the effort, however, went into “continuity of government.” The government has spent untold billions of dollars on keeping enough members of the government alive to support ongoing constitutional government. Who would argue that this is not necessary? Of course it is necessary. But, since the 1980s and 1990s, we ordinary people have been on our own. We can’t even expect a warning anymore, let alone protection. Resources simply don’t exist to support the population after widespread catastrophe.

The American “continuity of government” system was brutally tested during 9/11. Raven Rock has an excellent chapter on 9/11. For hours, the administration and the military hardly knew what was going on. They were watching television like the rest of us. We failed that test. If improvements in “continuity of government” have been made with the billions of dollars that have been spent since then, there is one thing we can still be sure of: We ordinary people will still be on our own.

What should we do? I have no idea. But awareness is surely a start. And pulling a delusional administration back toward reality is the first thing on the list.

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War is not a book that most people will want to read cover to cover. I certainly didn’t. It’s more of a reference. The book is a collection of papers from a conference that was held at Stanford University in 1985. A list of the titles of some of the chapters should underscore just how scared we ought to be, even though our capacity for despair is overloaded:

Possible Fatalities from Superfires Following Nuclear Attacks in or near Urban Areas

A Review of the Physics of Large Urban Fires

Nuclear Famine: The Indirect Effects of Nuclear War

Nuclear Winter: The State of the Science

Possible Toxic Environments Following a Nuclear War

Radioactive Fallout

Acute Radiation Mortality in Nuclear War

Burn and Blast Casualties: Triage in Nuclear War

Psychological Consequences of Disaster

Expected Incidence of Cancer Following Nuclear War

Genetic Consequences of Nuclear War

Sources of Human Instability in the Handling of Nuclear Weapons

Here’s a short quote from the chapter on nuclear famine:

“The consensus that developed was stark: the indirect effects of large-scale nuclear war would probably be far more consequential than the direct effects; and the primary mechanism for human fatalities would likely not be from blast effects, not from thermal radiation burns, and not from ionizing radiation, but, rather, from mass starvation.”

I apologize for this disturbing distraction. Now let’s all go turn on our televisions and catch up on the engaging media drama of what’s new with Trump’s wall.

Update: Yesterday in the New Yorker:

Can Elizabeth Warren and Adam Smith, Defying Trump, Persuade Americans to Get Serious About Nuclear-Arms Control?

Pumpkin-leek tarte with barley crust

I posted a few days ago about a dessert pumpkin pie with a barley crust. But with more than twenty little pumpkins stored under the stairs that need to be used before spring is over, dessert pies wouldn’t be very healthy, with no one but me to eat them. So here is a quiche-like vegetable pie, with a reasonably low level of carbs as well as fat.

In my previous experiment with barley crust, I used the amount of oil that I would normally use for a wheat crust. That was entirely too much oil for the barley. The crust was too crumbly. This time I reduced the amount of oil by half (to a quarter of a cup for two cups of flour) and made up for it with water. That worked great.

My little pumpkins look so magical that I have a hard time taking a knife to them and eating them. I have to remind myself that that’s why I grew them, and that, left under the stairs, they’d only rot. I do take a portrait each time I use one. Though these are true pumpkins, they’re also like winter squash. So if you don’t have baskets of little pumpkins under your stairs, you could use winter squash for a tarte like this. I used two large stalks of leeks, lightly sautéed in olive oil. The other ingredients are two eggs, some grated Gruyère, and seasonings including a quarter teaspoon of nutmug. The top of the tarte is sprinkled with grated Gruyère and some parmesan.

The dough for barley crust is stickier and more fragile than a wheat crust. I roll pie crusts between sheets of waxed paper. To keep the barley crust from sticking to the paper, I oiled the paper lightly with olive oil.

The tarte was delicious. Many kinds of vegetables can be turned into a tarte. A turnip tarte? Why not. Next time, I’d like to impart a little roasted flavor into the tarte, maybe with some browned onions or shallots. Also, I’ll oil the pie plate next time, to give the bottom crust a bit more crustiness.

Though this tarte looks like a quiche, there is no milk or cream in it. Just two eggs and some grated cheese with vegetables.


The crust is organic hulled barley, which I grind into flour myself.


Portrait of the little pumpkin that was dispatched for this tarte, with a spice bottle for scale


The top of the pumpkin browns because I used the small oven. But the texture of the pumpkin inside is more steamed than baked.

A vegan Scotch broth

I wrote about Scotch broth here five years ago, and I mentioned that the best soup I’ve ever had was a Scotch broth. It was in Edinburgh, on my first trip to Scotland in the mid-1980s. Though it was a vegetable soup, I might not have known at the time that the stock was based on sheep bones.

With Scotch broth, the broth is everything. It’s the sheep bones, I’m sure, that give authentic Scotch broth its sturdy substance. I’ve never made broth with sheep bones, so I’m always looking for substitutes. It occurred to me that the cooking water from chickpeas might help. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve read that if the cooking water from chickpeas is concentrated enough, it will whip up like egg whites. For this pot of broth, I used about one-quarter chickpea broth, one-quarter pumpkin juice (drained from a baked pumpkin that went into a pie), and one-half water. The barley, which is essential to Scotch broth, also helps with thickening the broth.

I’ve been known to make a slightly reddened Scotch broth with a touch of tomato paste. But the Scotch broth that I had in Edinburgh was green — from split peas and leeks, I’m sure. I went for green on this pot of Scotch broth, and I got the color I wanted.

The ingredients are the stock, barley, dried split peas, some rutabaga (which I believe the Scottish call a swede), onion, carrot, celery, and leeks. The soup needs a long, slow simmer. I added the leeks for the last 20 minutes of cooking.

A chicken story with a happy ending


One of many feathers found at the scene

I was sitting at the computer upstairs when I heard the chickens screaming. I dashed to the side porch, slipped on my shoes without tying them, grabbed a broom, and ran toward the orchard yelling.

The battle was happening on the far upper end of the orchard, beyond the asparagus patch. I couldn’t see the battle clearly through the weeds and honeysuckle that grow on the fence. One chicken ran out of the undergrowth and headed toward the garden. But from the sound it was clear that another chicken was still engaged. Not until I loomed over the scene of the crime with my broom did the hawk try to get away. It crashed against the fence several times before it realized that it had to fly toward me to escape. I could have knocked it out of the air with my broom if I had tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

A terrified chicken got up from the ground, dazed. She didn’t seem to be injured. She stumbled toward the chicken house, climbed the ramp, went inside, and cringed in one of the nests in a corner, trembling. The chicken that had run to the garden was fine, though scared out of her wits. It took me a while to find the third chicken. She had gone to ground down below the chicken house, hiding under some brush. She answered when I spoke to her and extricated herself from the brush. I escorted her to the chicken house to comfort her sister.

If chickens have the freedom that they love and deserve, then hawks are the biggest problem. Dogs, foxes, and coyotes have never gotten through the fences here. Raccoons only come at night, when the chickens are locked safely inside the chicken house.

The local hawks — Cooper’s hawks, I believe — are not any bigger than a chicken. A chicken that puts up a good fight can escape a hawk attack. What’s funny about this hawk attack (the first attack I’ve had since last summer) is that I am pretty sure that two chickens were fighting the hawk. That’s not what I would have expected. I would expect all the chickens to run except for the one that can’t get away. One of my chickens, I suspect, deserves a medal for bravery.

Everyone who has had chickens in this area struggles with the same question: Is it worth it? Is it fair to expose chickens to a danger from which you can’t fully protect them? The chicken infrastructure here is better than what most people can provide. Most chickens here live to be several years old. Those years are good, happy years. This is my eleventh year of keeping chickens here. I’m not ready to give up. Nor can I blame hawks for being hawks. I just wish they’d stay away. I hope this one learned a lesson.

According to PETA, 9 billion chickens are killed each year in the U.S. to be eaten by humans. Worldwide, the number is 50 billion. Their lives are as terrible as their deaths. Misery on that scale is existentially incomprehensible to me. If you’ve ever gotten to know a chicken, you know what sweet, sensitive, emotional creatures they are. A happy chicken that can truly live like a chicken is a rare thing. My chickens live that way most of the time. Their vulnerability is disheartening. But it’s wonderful to see them fight for their lives — and win.

There were lots of feathers at the scene of the crime. Most were clearly chicken feathers. There was one large feather that I believe is a wing feather from a hawk. Way to go, girls.

Barley crust = pumpkin pie fit for a monastery


Pumpkin pie with barley-flour crust

I have written before about my experiments with home-ground barley flour: When is it a good substitute for wheat, and when is it not? Barley flour makes a very good pie crust.

It’s good, I would say, but not perfect. Made with the usual amount of oil, the barley-flour crust is too crumbly. But, particularly for the parts of the crust that stand above the pie and are exposed to the heat of the oven, the tasty toastiness of the barley crust is fantastic. For my next experiment with barley-flour pie crusts, I will reduce the amount of oil in the crust and compensate with water.

Over the next few days, I will eat this whole pie. So I wanted it to be as healthy and low-calorie as possible. I reduced the amount of sugar by half — from three-quarters of a cup to half a cup. It still tastes like a desert. But the reduced sugar actually enhances the pumpkin taste. And the pumpkin taste is very good. I can even imagine a savory vegetable pie based on pumpkin with no sugar at all. These are my organic homegrown pumpkins. I still have lots of pumpkins left from the 2018 pumpkin crop, stored in baskets under the stairs.

Something about the barley taste is very old-fashioned. The taste of toasted barley is so good that I Googled for “toasted barley flour,” thinking that it surely must be a thing. Sure enough, toasted barley flour is a staple of Tibetan cuisine.

The old-fashioned taste of the barley and the reduced sugar produced a kind of austere pie that actually was appealing in its austerity. Pumpkins are a New World food. But if some monks in Gaul in the 13th Century had some pumpkin pie, then this is what I’d imagine it would taste like.


One of my little pumpkins after baking. I’ll scoop out the flesh and give the rest to the chickens.


Fresh-ground barley flour

It’s inevitable

The March cover story of The Atlantic probably marks a turning point in the long process of bringing Donald Trump to justice. The Atlantic is a centrist publication that often speaks for Washington’s centrist think-tank establishment. This article makes it official: the centrist Washington establishment is done with Trump. They now understand what he has done.

Here’s a link to the article, which is magisterial: Impeach Donald Trump.

February 7 probably is the day when most Americans, who are very busy and distracted, will begin to pay attention. That’s the day Michael Cohen (Trump’s “fixer” and former attorney) starts his testimony to the House Oversight Committee. On February 8, Matthew Whitaker (Trump’s acting attorney general) will testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

My view, based of course only on dot-connecting and following bread crumbs, is that Washington already knows what has to happen — that Trump must leave office. It took time to collect the evidence and to build the legal case. It appears that Robert Mueller is almost done with that. The next step, then, is to inform the American people and to prepare the American people for what is going to happen. That preparation process is now beginning. It seems highly likely that yesterday’s reports that Trump instructed Cohen to lie under oath to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project (that alone would be grounds for impeachment) is a part of the preparation process. What the American people are going to learn from Cohen’s testimony on February 7 is going to be shocking. As Yoni Appelbaum points out in the Atlantic article, once Trump’s crimes start being described in day after day of public testimony in Congress, Trump (and Fox News) will have no chance of controlling the narrative. Instead, the narrative will be about the FBI’s evidence and congressional testimony under oath.

Linux

Recently someone gave me a 10-year-old (or so) laptop that had been written off as dead. It was sold with Windows Vista, and it would no longer boot. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it and found that it works great. Bottom line: Free laptop.

I’m a Mac loyalist and a conscientious objector to anything from Microsoft (though I believe that Microsoft products have gotten much better now that they’ve lost their monopoly and competition has forced them to improve their software). I’ve been a Unix user since about 1985, and I first used Linux in the early 1990s. Linux has come a long way.

A laptop is not something that I particularly need. But, on those relatively rare occasions when I travel, a laptop is nice to have. Laptops of this vintage can be bought on eBay for as little as $40 if you catch a bargain. In choosing an older laptop to run Linux, you want one new enough to have a dual-core 64-bit processor and 4 GB of memory. An older laptop may be heavy, but they’re cheap. Older batteries can be a problem, but the battery in my newly acquired laptop will run for about an hour. Most of the time, though, even when traveling, you can find a place to plug the laptop into the wall. You’ll want a laptop with built-in WIFI.

Learning to use Linux may be a tad more difficult than learning to use a Mac or a Windows machine. But Linux has gotten much easier to use, with a pretty graphical interface. Probably the biggest challenge that most people would face in bringing up an older laptop on Linux is installing Linux. That’s not something that I want to get into here in detail, because you’ll find many tutorials if you Google for it. But the simplest route is to download a Linux installer on another computer and then copy the installer to a USB thumb drive that is configured to be bootable. You boot the laptop off the USB thumb drive and run the Linux installer. Once you’ve installed Linux, the sailing is much easier.

I am using Ubuntu Linux 18.04, which is the newest version of Ubuntu Linux at present. Ubuntu Linux comes with LibreOffice already installed. LibreOffice is an open-source suite of office software that is, as far as I know, pretty much 100 percent compatible with Microsoft Office. It’s as easy to use as Microsoft Office. It will open all your existing Microsoft Office files. And if you use LibreOffice for word processing, you can send your files to users of Microsoft Office and they’ll be able to open the files just fine.

Ubuntu Linux also comes with the FireFox web browser installed, and Thunderbird for email. If you need software that is not pre-installed, there is a long list of open-source applications that Ubuntu will download and install for you.

Weather emergencies


Ice storm on the ridge

During the weekend, an ice storm turned out to be considerably worse than was forecast. Around sunrise on Sunday morning, the lights starting dimming, then flickered, then went out. Power failures are common here, but somehow I knew that this one would last longer than usual.

In bucking myself up to make the best of it, I decided that I should see it as a trial run for larger emergencies, as a test of how well prepared I am for a relatively brief weather emergency.

Staying warm at these latitudes might be a real challenge during unusually cold weather, such as a “polar vortex.” But when the temperature is around 30F, the outdoor temperature is not a serious threat. I have a propane fireplace for backup heat. I also have a lot of warm clothing. Staying warm: No big deal, even for the cat.

Water: Also not a big deal. I have drinking water as well as flushing water stashed away. I did decide that I should do a better job of supplying washing-up water near the kitchen sink.

Cooking: Also not a big deal. I have propane-fueled camping cookers for that. I don’t like having those things indoors, so a table under the roofed part of the deck becomes the cooking area. It would be nice to have some sort of oven during a long outage, so that needs some thought.

Hot water: In small amounts, heating water in a kettle over a propane cooker is not a big deal. But what if an outage lasted for days, and one needed enough hot water for laundry or baths? That’s a bigger issue. Probably the most practical solution would be to drop back 100 years and heat water outdoors, with a tripod and cauldron over a wood fire. That needs thought.

Food: Food is not a problem. I have emergency food tucked away if I should need it. And when bad weather is forecast, I stock up on groceries.

Refrigeration: I didn’t open the freezer. When the power came back after 14 hours, the temperature inside the freezer was 17 degrees rather than the usual zero — not a problem. For a longer outage, I’d have to sacrifice whatever is in the freezer.

Emergency power: I don’t have, and I don’t really want, a generator. They’re noisy and aggravating and require fuel. However, when the power is out, you can’t have too much battery power.

Lighting: I’ve got candles and kerosene lanterns. But the most convenient, and the safest, form of lighting is to use battery power. I have lots of flashlights, but a headlamp of the type used by campers is by far the most convenient.

Battery power: The challenge with batteries is to keep them charged, both before you need them and after you start using them. You need to stash a lot of batteries of all sizes. But what about rechargeable devices such as smart phones, which want to be charged with a USB connection? For that I have one of the heavy battery-powered devices that is used to jump-start cars with dead batteries. These things usually have 110-volt inverter connections and USB outlets. Its internal lead-acid battery has enough capacity to keep a cell phone charged for many days. Don’t expect to get much 110-volt power out of it, though. Its internal battery is not that big.

Solar power: If a power failure lasts for days, lots of batteries are going to need charging. For that I have a 50-watt solar panel that I have never used. I just keep it stashed until I need it. The controller that goes with the solar panel can charge 12-volt batteries, 24-volt batteries, or USB devices. One needs at least one deep-discharge marine-type battery. A small solar-powered system sufficient to keep your flashlight batteries, phone, and a radio charged can be put together for around $200.

Communications: This, I found, is the biggie. You need a plan for keeping your smart phone charged, though of course a land-line telephone is a good thing if you still have a land line. The most serious challenge I faced during a relatively short outage was getting local news from the outside world. You’ll want to know how bad things are out there. Depending on how close you are to civilization and news organizations, a nearby radio station may or may not be helpful. The only helpful solution in my location is a scanner for monitoring emergency communications.

Local emergency communications: During the past few years, most cities and counties have abandoned their older analog radio systems and have switched to digital “trunk tracking” communications. Trunk-tracking scanners are expensive and complicated. An alternative, as long as your smart phone is charged, are smart phone apps such as “Scanner” for iPhone. Such apps should be able to monitor local emergency communications based on your location, using your cellular data. This may not be 100 percent reliable, because someone in your county, as a public service, has to make these audio feeds available. But this worked for me last weekend. The alternative is to spend $300 to $400 on a scanner and to run it on battery power.

So, how was it out there?: It was a mess! The sheriff’s department and fire departments were kept busy by power lines that had fallen on or near roadways. Some of the downed power lines caused fires. There also were a great many trees fallen across roads. Ambulances were called for a good many heart attacks, plus what sounded like a drug overdose. Several times, sheriff’s deputies asked the dispatcher when service trucks from the power company were expected to arrive. That made it clear that the power company’s priority was responding to emergency requests from the sheriff’s department rather than outage complaints from homeowners. I was surprised, really, that I got power back after only 14 hours.

Reading material: I have a Kindle. But there’s nothing like an old-fashioned book, read by the fire.

With the exception of a solar-powered charging system or a scanner for emergency communications, none of these preparations are expensive. We should all have, at a minimum, a three-day emergency plan. Longer would be better.


Scanner app for iPhone


Breakfast oats out on the deck, boiling over