No electrical power usually means no lights, no microwave oven, no refrigerator, no television, and quite possibly no Internet access. It forces people to spend at least a little bit of time living and interacting in an old-fashioned way, and I think it’s occasionally a good experience. After all, if a billion people are now connected to the Internet, that means five billion people are not connected. And there’s still a large number of people who don’t have telephones, have never made a phone call in their lives, and who don’t have electricity. It’s a good idea for those of us whose entire lives are augmented, supported, and enhanced by technology are still only a small minority of humans on this planet.

Experiences like this occur in my life approximately once every year or two. The most recent experience occurred because we’re spending Labor Day weekend with friends at a farm in Culpeper, Virginia — one of many Civil War historical areas about 75 miles west of Washington, DC. The remnants of Hurricane Ernesto was sweeping up the East Coast as we drove down from New York, and after eight hours of driving through the rain, we arrived to find that several trees had been knocked down in the area, and electrical power was out. It’s now more than 36 hours later, and power is still out; the electric company predicted that it would be restored at 10 PM last night, and now they’re hoping it will be 10 PM tonight.

The farm was built in the 1930s, during a period when power outages were probably more frequent and long-lasting; in any case, our friends have a generator and a tank of diesel fuel that will provide alternate power for three or four days. But a few of the more recently-installed appliances, including the electric stove, dishwasher, and microwave oven, are not wired into the circuits powered by the generator, so the plans for elegantly-cooked meals have been modified. Our friends recently installed a cable-modem/WiFi internet access at the farm, but the router is also plugged into a circuit that’s not connected to the generator; we fixed that by running a long extension cord to another outlet. So I can access the Internet, but when my laptop batteries wear down, I have to find a remote corner of the house where a functioning power plug will let me recharge …There’s no television, so we can’t find out how Andre Agassi is faring at the U.S. Open; however, we’ve also been spared the ordeal of watching the Sunday morning “talking heads” commentators on television.

In the absence of technology, we’ve been forced to revert back to the kind of behavior we took for granted back in the 50s and 60s: we’re sitting across the kitchen table from our friends, engaged in pleasant conversation. We’re going out for walks in the surrounding meadows. We’re finding comfortable overstuffed chairs in quiet corners of the house, and spending a relaxing couple of hours reading old-fashioned books that we never had time for in our computer-stimulated world. All in all, it’s been a very pleasant Labor Day weekend.

We’ll be driving back to New York tomorrow, and will probably spend eight hours in a 200-mile long traffic jam; consequently, you may not see a blog posting from me tomorrow. I’ll be back on line by Tuesday morning; but for the rest of the day, I think I’ll go read a book…