In the Dark

By Sutton R. Stokes, 8-14-08

The best advice today at U-MT’s Mike Mansfield Library was not to use the elevators.

The power went off for the first time while I was using a lobby computer to view an AP slideshow of battle-hardened Russian soldiers, rushed in from Chechnya, doing pretty much whatever they felt like doing in Georgia while their leaders and ours pretended some sort of cease fire was being observed.

Earlier, technicians were testing the library’s fire alarms, and a librarian walked up and down the rows of workstations, offering earplugs. I was one of the few takers, so when the lights went off, I was in a state of almost total sensory deprivation, and this only strengthened the mood of imminent apocalyptic doom that — I’ll be honest — is pretty much my default setting, although it certainly wasn’t being lessened at that moment by the way various members of the American lunatic class — McCain, Krauthammer, Bolton — have been reacting to recent events in Georgia by essentially falling to their knees and thanking God for the chance at another clear-cut, splendid little war between Good and Evil, now that the whole struggle against “Islamofascism” has grown some confusing gray areas and, frankly, become a little boring for those with a prejudice toward Taking Action and/or Putting Boots in Their Asses.

The next power outage, about fifteen minutes later, caught me in the fifth-floor men’s room and was impressive for its duration. How often, in a large public building in this country, do we experience any long power interruptions at all, before some backup system kicks in? I waited in the dark for a little while, then continued about my business, which, fortunately — after more than three decades’ practice — I am now qualified to perform using instruments alone.

I knew that if the lights were still out when I was done, I could use the glow of my cell-phone screen to find my way to the stairwell, where the helpfully placed windows would admit enough light to get me downstairs safely.

Even so, I was regretting my current policy of leaving my sweet Surefire LED flashlight at home. What would I do if caught in an unfolding catastrophe in a building that doesn’t make such intelligent use of natural lighting? I realized that I was ignoring the advice of disaster-preparedness experts, who recommend keeping a flashlight on you at all times, especially if you work in a building of any size. You can use it to find your way, signal rescue workers, blind and disorient Islamofascists creeping toward you in the dark (they recoil from light as if burned by acid, you know), you name it — a flashlight sure is a handy thing to have around.

I’m a bit of a disaster-preparedness type myself, although more in the sense that I like learning about how doomed we all are, as opposed to making any real preparations. I used to have a stockpile of drinking water but haven’t built that up again since we moved to Montana last summer, and I have some decent flashlights and other equipment I won’t list here that might be useful in the acute stages of an emergency, but that’s about it. Really, though: how many of us are truly ready to survive without government assistance for a few days, as Katrina (should have) taught us we need to be?

The lights came back on and I made my way downstairs again. From the landing on the main floor, I overheard a woman in business attire talking to men in dungarees with walkie-talkies hanging from their belts. They were standing one level below me, in the open doorway of a machinery room, from which a loud mechanical roar emanated.

“I was sitting in my office, and it [the roar, I guess] suddenly got louder and louder, like it was going to blow up,” she said. “Then the lights went out.”

One of the men said something in an explanatory tone about someone “closing a loop.”

Back on a lobby computer, I tried to call up the on-line library catalog, but it was not accessible. I asked at the front desk and learned that the power outage had caused a problem with the servers and that it would probably be awhile before the catalog was back on line.

“Is there any backup?” I asked. “If there is no power, is there any way to locate a title?”

“No,” said one of the librarians. “We have an off-line backup, but it’s also electronic.”

In other words, when the electromagnetic pulse comes, or when the oil stops showing up at our end of the pipelines, no more library catalogs — unless your library is one of the few that has retained (and continues to update) its card catalog. (Anyone even remember how to use one? Remember the three types of cards, etc.?)

You might be thinking that, when the emergency comes, we’ll all be too busy trying to survive and won’t have time to waste at the library, but I would counter by pointing out that a university library — especially at a land-grant institution like U-MT — might have some pretty essential information on primitive farming methods, emergency field medicine, gunpowder manufacturing, and the routes to power of history’s great warlords, any or all of which will probably be interesting and useful to us as we stand around blinking painfully in the first harsh light of humanity’s next dawn.

Maybe we’ll even need to let a few of the librarians keep working — manually cataloging the collection, working by candlelight like monks — rather than conscript them to labor on the massive fortifications the rest of us will be building in a desperate and probably doomed effort to hold back the hordes of refugees and scavengers from Spokane and Seattle.

In the meantime, carry a flashlight and remember to take your medication. Neither one will protect you when the end comes, but at least you’ll feel a little better in the meantime.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.