Living on the Grid

It was a couple of weeks ago; there had been rain and thunderstorms for much of the weekend, and then, there were MARTA buses coming down Wessyngton Road. I heard the traffic before I saw it, but when I went outside, there was a steady and uncharacteristic flow of cars from the North Highland end of the street toward Cumberland. The power had gone off, too, so I figured there was a tree down on Highland and cars were detouring down our street. On my way up the street to try to find out what was going on, I saw Lynsley and Bill and Linda. They'd heard that a power pole was down, maybe struck by lightning.

On North Highland, yellow tape blocked the street and the sidewalks; there were Georgia Power trucks at the other end of the block, near Lanier, so I walked around the block to get a better look. By the time I got there, there wasn't much going on, and if a power pole had been down, a new one had replaced it already and the old one had been hauled away. People were starting to walk around or under the yellow tape that blocked the sidewalks and make their way past the trucks, still parked in the middle of the street, and the workmen who looked like they were waiting for directions on where to head next.



On my way home, back down Wessyngton from North Highland, I had to pay more attention than usual to the traffic -- there still was a steady flow of cars toward Cumberland -- but there were lots of pedestrians out, doing the same thing I'd done, trying to figure out why all the traffic and when the power might be back on. I saw lots of our neighbors that afternoon. One said, "I love it when there's a disaster." I think she meant it was fun to see everyone out walking around when Something Happens. I didn't say, "I do, too," but I did smile in response.

Many years ago -- before I moved to Atlanta -- I read a book about city planning that described what's now called New Urbanism -- the idea that cities should be designed to be pleasant and walkable with mixed use, for the benefit of everyone and not just people driving cars. One of the principles of the New Urbanism is that streets should go somewhere; they should be connected to the street grid, easing movement and dispersing traffic, rather than the tangle of deadend streets in many subdivisions that forces all the traffic onto arterial roads. I had never thought about this before I read that book and decided at that point that I never wanted to live on a street that didn't go anywhere.

There was an article in the Times last week about the housing market in Atlanta, which over the last year had the largest declines in prices of any major metropolitan area. But the neighborhoods described in the story weren't intown; they were in Marietta and Dacula and Jonesboro and Norcross. It's not that we didn't have foreclosures in our neighborhood -- we did, but that was a year or two ago. At least here, it's better now.

The New Urbanism people say that houses on streets that are connected to the grid of other streets in the community appreciate more in value than houses on streets that don't go anywhere. The occasional MARTA bus on Wessyngton Road is a small price to pay for living on a street in a real neighborhood, where there are places to walk and streets that will get you there.  

Enough of this; it's time for Iain and me to walk to Alon's and the farmers' market.

A Dark and Stormy Night

The weather has oscillated between chilly (although perhaps seasonal) and too warm for the calendar.  Monday was very warm, and that night we had the upstairs windows open and the attic fan on.  Not much sleep that night.  First, it was hot upstairs, and it seemed like every time I went to sleep the weather radio would go off, with a warning that there were severe storms in the area.  I grew up in Oklahoma, in towns that periodically got wiped off the map by tornadoes, so I have great respect for weather; I would listen each time for long enough to make sure that it wasn't a tornado warning for Atlanta, and then hit the button to end the message but leave the radio on.

It was sometime around midnight that there was a really loud crash.  I went downstairs in the dark to make sure things were okay; I didn't see anything wrong, but I didn't look very hard.  Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be inside the house.  It wasn't long after that that I was up again; the power was off, and the alarms on the uninterrupted power supplies on the computers were beeping.  Outside, it was still windy with rain.  Caroline got up too and she turned off the computers and we unplugged other electronics; upstairs, we closed the windows to keep out the rain.  She was texting her friends and got updates from around the area, who had power and who didn't.  (High school kids apparently only sleep in the daytime.)  She looked out into the street, into the storm, and said there were tree branches in the street, but my car looked okay; we saw a driver made his way, then, past the downed branches so it must not be too bad.  Whether the car was okay or not, I wasn't going outside to check; even if the storm wasn't still going on, it wouldn't be safe to go outside in the dark with the possibility of downed powerlines.

I personally have gone over that list from Ready.gov with the Cub Scouts, for what you need to be prepared at home, but in the morning we couldn't find any of the probably 20 flashlights that are somewhere in the house; I couldn't even find - without Tom's help - the matches.  The battery powered lantern - which I did eventually find -  hadn't been recharged after the last camping trip.  So Tom made an early morning trip to Home Depot for flashlights, making his way through the neighborhood in the dark with trees down blocking streets at random.  But before he went to Home Depot, he was standing in the doorway and told me that the large limbs that had fallen from the tulip poplar across the street were on top of my car.

We were still worried about downed power lines so I didn't get out to check the damage until it was light.  That loud crashing sound the night before had almost certainly been the back of my car, exploding.

An early morning phone call to the 24 hour toll-free claim number at State Farm ("There's a tree on my car"), and a vague assurance that I would hear back sometime ("This morning?" "Probably not").  Retrieving stuff from the trunk through the broken back window.  It was back to being cold again, and I had to wear a jacket.  The one thing that had been in the car that mattered - the box of material for updating my overdue book chapter - wasn't damaged by the rain that had gotten in through the broken window over night.

The power came on around midnight the following night, and then went off again.  When I got home from work, I called Georgia Power and the automated voice (with a warm Georgia accent) said they expected to have the power back on that day.  I took the kids out to dinner, and just as we returned, a convoy of Georgia Power and Altec trucks appeared in front of the house.  Tom and I sat on the porch and watched them, working under bright lights on the darkened street, put the power line that had slipped off the insulator on the top of the pole back into place.  I told Tom, those guys, they're heroes.  They moved on up the street, and it wasn't long before we noticed the street lights were back on.  We turned around and looked inside, and the lights were on in our kitchen. 

I found Iain upstairs asleep, with his bedroom light on; the power had come back on after he had gone to bed.  I switched it off, and went to bed.