Blackout - Nov. 13, 2007
This is it. This is the way San Felipe was almost a
generation ago. The power is out, night has fallen and
in every direction there’s darkness as far as
the eye can see.
Rumor has it a federal helicopter crashed into one
of the power grid towers while pursuing narcotráficos.
Now the continuity of the long copper arteries that
runnel from Ensenada to the Sea of Cortez, swagged from
steeple to steeple across mountains and through valleys,
has been broken. A synapse is dead and a part of Baja’s
brain has gone dark. The part that gives memory to San
Felipe.
All
around town and along the highway, CFE meter discs have
stopped revolving in their glass jars and near the entrance
to every yard, a breaker box offers no impulse from
the fretwork of its cables. Television screens are black
as a crow’s yawn and everyone with an electric
stove is eating a cold dinner. Cafes and restaurants
are closed. Grocery stores, if they have no backup generator,
have assembled their employees to watch frozen stock
slowly become incontinent before turning bad. The boticas
and pharmacies are having a terrific run on batteries
and soon, one by one, the ubiquitous boom boxes will
fade into silence. Gas stations are as good as dry without
power for their pumps. And tomorrow, warm beer will
be the only antidote for the unseasonably warm temperatures.
I’m sitting beside a homemade table outside my
trailer. An aura of white light emanates from the hisses
of a Coleman lamp near my elbow. I have to keep remembering
not to rest my left arm near the top of the writing
pad, which throws it into shadow.
A sickle moon above the fifth wheel looks like the
edge of a coin dropped through a slot cut into the evening
sky. The power has been out for four hours. All the
advertising boards and store signs are dark along the
highway. It’s a forced innocence, owing a debt
to drug smugglers and a less than artful helicopter
pilot.
At public addresses and near habitual gathering places,
brows furrow above whispers that say the outage will
last for at least two days. There’s hysteria behind
their nervous eyes. Only the highway and street dogs
are unaffected. Their noise is cultural and unrelenting,
at least until gas tanks run dry. Then there’ll
only be the dogs.
It’s a gift to be back in Old Mexico. The charcoal
night is much like a covering of fresh snow. It hides
the minutiae of progress, the cluttered edges of all
the garish bric-a-brac that jostle like Wall Street
traders with panic-filled voices, importuning even the
meekest passerby. But without electricity, the machinery
labors down to a rusted stillness and becomes just another
faint outline in the darkening air. Blackness proliferates
and neighbors slowly open windows and doors as silence
fills their homes. They drag out an old burning barrel
and hunt scraps of wood with flashlights. Stories are
told around dancing flames -about other blackouts -about
Enron switching off grid stations to chimney up California
power bills.
Bats fly in and out of the laughter, turning with electric
quickness. No radio, ice machine, home theatre or popcorn-maker
distracts the fireside camaraderie. It’s back
to first causes and the ageless device of sharing a
common distress. In this small Baja town the universal
currency is no longer the diversity of physical complaints
suffered by its senior population. But rather, it’s
the leveling agent of a power blackout that puts everyone
on the same footing.
Whether Mexican or American, shoulders shrug and arms
go up in feigned disbelief, knowing all the while anything
can happen down here. Any wayward helicopter or plane
can drop a blanket of darkness over an entire valley
and perhaps compel its population of friends and strangers,
if only for one evening, to adopt older and quainter
ways of communication.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the mountains, less caring
people are trying to process drugs in the dark.
Addendum (as reported
on QuePasaBaja.com):
A helicopter that was flying
over the Baja 1000 route came down today, right before
3PM, leaving a death toll of two, plus two other people
in critical condition.
Apparently, the craft came
in contact with some high voltage cables, which caused
it falling around the KM marker 127 of the Ensenada-Valle
de la Trinidad highway, near Rancho Mike.
Two of the helicopter passengers,
Pablo Gonzalez and Israel Romero Reyes, died intantly,
while the pilot, Israel Sarabia and co-pilot Rodolfo
Calvillo were severely injured. The helicopter was rented
in the city of Tijuana with the intention of filming
the race from the air.
According to Jaime Nieto,
the area Firefighter chief, the accident caused an enormous
blackout that reached all the way to the San Felipe
Port.
Read about
the crash victims...