On Power Outages, Laura Ingalls, and Rising to the Occasion
By Cara Stolen
@carastolen
It was a Saturday in mid-December, and the high temperature that day hovered right around 18°F. My older two kids were having quiet time in their rooms while my 15-month-old napped, and I’d just laid down on the couch with my book when I heard the telltale click, followed by quiet, that indicated our power had gone out. It’s a specific kind of quiet, that of a rural power outage. The low, almost-imperceptible hum of the refrigerator? The slight buzz of the fluorescent lights in the kitchen? The whir of the fan in the baby’s room? All, suddenly, absent. Replaced by utter silence.
I checked the power company’s website for an estimated wait time, submitted an outage ticket, and lay back down on the couch to take a nap. After naptime, I loaded up the kids for the 20 minute drive from our house to town, where I picked up a grocery order, filled my car with gas, and made a few other random stops. I assumed power would be restored by the time we got home, but when we pulled back in our driveway a few hours later, in the dark, the absent glow of the automatic porch lights told me otherwise.
My husband, as always seems to be the case when something like this happens, was processing cows at a feedlot the next county over and would be home late. I was on my own, with three hungry kids, a car full of groceries, and no power.
I checked the power company website again. The “projected outage length” field still read “unknown.” I grew up at the top of a mountain pass, and endured several multi-day power outages as a child, so in theory, I knew what to do. But in reality? The thought of getting more firewood for the house, figuring out a plan for the groceries I’d just picked up, and feeding my kids without electricity totally overwhelmed me. And even if I managed all of that, how would I ever get the kids to sleep? Even when we have power, they holler at me from their beds to avoid crossing the terrifying dark abyss of the hallway between their rooms and mine. I felt my palms start to sweat.
Masking my anxiety with enthusiasm, I declared, “It’ll be like we’re pioneers!”
One of my earliest memories is of watching a covered wagon ford a river in remote Eastern Oregon with my mom for the Sesquicentennial of the Oregon Trail. I was four, so the memory lives deep within the recesses of my brain where I can just barely access it. It’s more a feeling than an image, and the more I try to focus on it, the more it seems to slip away. But I remember the hot sun, the splash of the water under the horses’ hooves, and the rolling hills of Oregon wheat land. If I had to guess, I would say that moment was when my obsession with what I called “pioneer women” began.
Between the ages of 5-10, on any given (nonschool) day, you could find me dressed in a getup more akin to a little girl from the 1800s than a 90s child. In a full skirt, lace-up boots, and sun bonnet, I traipsed around the 40 acres of my parents’ property, lost in a pretend world of covered wagons and adventure. This was before the Oregon Trail computer game craze of the late 1990s—before “provisions” and “bear maulings” and “dysentery” became a part of the collective vernacular of my generation—so you could say I was ahead of my time (or very, very behind). I did “sums” on an old chalkboard, cooked elaborate meals of bird seed and sawdust for my imaginary family at the end of a long, hard day of travel, and forded raging rivers (i.e. our creek) on my journey westward.
I loved the idea of a “New Frontier.” Of staking a claim of land and attending a one-room schoolhouse. Of an untouched American West. And though I’ve since given up the long skirt and sun bonnet (and now understand some of the more problematic parts of the westward migration of the 1800s), I harbored my romantic ideas about pioneer women well into adulthood.
A few years ago I read a modern retelling of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life story, told from the point of view of her mother, Caroline. Snuggled between my kids on the couch, with Daniel Tiger softly singing in the background and the wood stove crackling behind me, I lost myself in the story of a young mother giving up everything to follow her husband’s westward dreams. Though I knew the iconic story well, this time I inserted myself into the mother role rather than the daughter, and started to question—for the first time—how I would have fared as one of those pioneer women I revered so much.
The thought of running wild on the open prairie, or sleeping in the bed of a covered wagon as it bumped along, or bathing in a big copper tub by the fire on Sundays is all fun and games from the perspective of a child. But washing a family of five’s laundry in the river every week? Cooking every meal, 365 days a year, over a piping hot stove, before convenience foods like sandwich bread were available in the store? Hauling the water for said Sunday bath? Living sandwiched into a 10x10 cabin without running water, electricity, or window panes? Giving birth in a dirt-floor cabin?
Sure, it would be a simple life, free from the distractions of employment, social media, and television. But it would also be labor intensive, isolated, and exhausting in a way I’m not sure I could handle.
The night of the power outage, after finding a headlamp in the entryway table and setting my kids up with books and a flashlight in the living room, I retrieved our biggest ice chest from the loft in the shop and unloaded my car full of groceries into it. I dug lanterns out of our camping totes and found headlamps for each of the kids. I stoked the wood stove and said a little prayer of thanks for our backup heat source. I lit the burner of our propane range with a match. Then, after trying the faucet of the kitchen sink and finding it dry, I took a stock pot outside, filled it with snow, and set it over the lit burner to melt.
I attended a Community Advisory Committee Meeting for our local school district recently. There was a teacher in attendance that night who is nearing retirement, who has been teaching in our district for most of her career. After a discussion about academic standards for athletes had run its course, she quietly said: “In my experience, people rise to the occasion at hand.”
She was talking about kids who want to play sports and their ability to maintain a certain GPA. But that phrase has been running through my mind ever since.
Is that the real story of Laura Ingalls and her mother, Caroline? Of the pioneer women and girls I spent so much time pretending to be? A story of, simply, women rising to the occasion at hand?
Did it even occur to them that they couldn’t handle the circumstances set before them?
That night I served my kids (and later my husband) chicken gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, and buttered bread. We ate by the light of a Coleman camping lantern, read Hank the Cowdog and sang songs by candlelight, and I tucked each of the kids into bed with a headlamp to ease their fears. Then, in the beam of my own headlamp, I melted more snow and did the dishes before calling it a night.
And though it was much more temporary and short-lived than I imagined as a child, for a night I lived like a pioneer woman. For a night, like Caroline Ingalls and so many women before me, I rose to the occasion at hand.
Cara Stolen is a ranch wife and work-at-home mama of three who lives in rural Washington state. An avid runner and outdoor enthusiast, she loves exceptionally early mornings, pushing the limits of an acceptable day hike, and backpacking or horse packing with her husband, Levi. She believes words have the power to buoy us through the hardest of times, and hopes to make other mothers feel seen with hers. You can find more of her work on her website.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.