Lights don't show what truly matters

Our women's choir was upstairs in the Sheldon Museum, surrounded by Chilkat Blankets, the original lens from the Eldred Rock Lighthouse, bear skin rugs and Haines' first snowmachine (it had an airplane propeller on the front). We were just about to learn a new song when the lights went out. Nancy, our director, who also works at the museum, ran to the basement to be sure the fire suppression system didn't go off. There was some stumbling in the dark until Nancy's daughter found a headlamp in her pack to light her way. Other headlamps, cell phones, and flashlights soon glowed. When Nancy returned and said all was well, we resumed rehearsing -- in the dark. Our final number, about the moon, made everyone laugh. It ended with "Please let the light that shines on me shine on the ones I love."

There was no moon, but it was "snowing mittens," as my Swedish friend says, when I waded through the slush to my car. The whole town had been dark about half an hour, something that rarely happens.

Haines gets most of our power from a hydroelectric plant near Skagway. When it cuts out (this time it was heavy snow knocking a tree onto the transmission lines) the crew from the power company fires up the diesel generator downtown. Which is why the power is usually restored so fast. This time, though, a line from the generator had apparently been damaged by the freeze-thaw cycles and would take hours to fix.

I hoped my family had assembled the enchiladas and put them in our gas oven before the electric ignition quit. I was having company, our neighbors Linnus and Liam and Sylvia. The mountain goat roast had simmered in the crock-pot all day; it gets shreddy and tender and is perfect for filling tortillas.

I had already made the vegetables, or dumped them in a pot, a mix of good Alaskan fare -- canned corn, canned black beans, canned tomatoes, an onion and spices.

On the way home, I stopped in to see how my neighbor Betty was enjoying the darkness. I wasn't the first one there. Young George Campbell was in the dark kitchen, half petting and half pushing away Betty's bear of a Newfoundland. "It's all under control," Betty said in her Rhode Island accent, pointing the flashlight. She didn't want to come over for dinner. A few votive candles flickered. Down here, closer to the beach, the heavy snow had changed to driving rain, strafing the storm door.

When I got home everyone was having a great time. Liam was at the kitchen table with his headlamp on, flipping through a new book about Haines pioneer Jack Dalton and commenting on the historical perspective of places he knows well from guiding in the Chilkat Valley. His girlfriend, Sylvia, was looking through a New Yorker. Linnus was speculating on the cause of the power failure and its length. My husband was making sure everyone had a drink, and then left to get a Coleman lantern from the garage. My daughters were putting more candles in canning jars, and everyone was shelling peanuts and eating chips and salsa and taking at once. The three dogs stayed close to catch any crumbs. Then our friend Tom came in the door shouting that if the freezer was thawing and we needed any help eating half a moose, he was hungry.

The enchiladas weren't in the oven but the stove top was easy to light, so I heated tortillas and put the hot filling in.

Eight of us sat around the big table, set with a minimum of silverware and dishes (less to leave in the sink if the well's electric pump stayed off). We said grace and prayed for friends coping with the sudden deaths of spouses and parents. We talked about the power and the weather, national politics and Sarah Palin, and whether the high school basketball team will go to state. You know, the usual chatter.

My daughters and husband went to bed, and Liam and Sylvia walked back across the road. Then Tom and I and Linnus, three old friends who have known each other for half our lives, stayed at the table, eating chocolate and drinking tea and talking about really big things, like life and death, love and marriage, regrets and dreams, for a long time as the candles puddled in the jars. It was just like Emily Dickinson wrote. We saw things more clearly with the lights out.

Heather Lende, who lives and writes in Haines, is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.