A geni of my own

(Kira update at the bottom)

I am happy to be the bearer of good news and to tell you that now that I have a generator of my own, I feel all grown up. I know this is ridiculous. I find it very funny. However, on some deep level, it resonates. It feels true.

The small Vermont Castings wood stove in the living room keeps my house lovely and toasty but with the geni, I feel independent. It means that when the power goes out on Pender Island, as it does frequently in the winter, sometimes for a week at a time, that I am not without resources. The food in my fridge won’t spoil. The food in my big chest freezer in the toolshed won’t go bad. I can charge my computer and get some writing done and my phone will stay working.

There are six ways that people cope with power outages here:

1)    If they don’t have a wood stove or an insert, people have been known to leave the island and travel to Victoria to rent a hotel room. This only works if the roads are passable. We had one storm with so many trees down on the roads no one could get in or out of the ferry terminal for two days.

2)    Use candles and huddle around the wood stove.

3)    Cook on a gas stove, though this does nothing to heat the house.

4)    Get a top-of-the-line propane backup system. This used to cost around $10,000., now I’m told it’s up to around $30,000. This backup system will kick in automatically when the power has been off for ten minutes. It will power the whole house and for the occupants, it’s business as usual, including watching TV.

5)    Buy a gas generator big enough to power the whole house and get an electrician in for a day’s work to install a new electrical panel. It’s not as expensive as 3) however it can be loud. Works, though, TV, internet et al. Friends who’ve chosen this option are very considerate about their neighbours and don’t leave their geni running for more than an hour and a half at a time.

6)    Use a small generator where you can plug in just the fridge and maybe a few lights.

I’m on option 6. When we built the house fifteen years ago, my husband designed it so there are two generator circuits wired in. When required, the generator is wheeled out to the vegetable garden and plugs into the house to power two 220v circuits, one in the kitchen for the fridge and one in the living room for charging devices. Initially, we used my husband’s huge ancient construction generator, one of those pull-cord things, where I would yank, try harder and swear. In response, the geni would cough once or twice in a limp way to let me know that it was having none of my nonsense. I wasn’t serious, it said.

My husband could get it working fine. Infuriatingly, I couldn’t. After he died, I ended up giving his generator away to a young family who were building a house. It still worked but I finally realized that I couldn’t start even a smaller generator that a neighbour loaned me.

That stung.

I have a view of myself as a capable woman. Apparently, I was not strong enough, no matter how motivated I was, to yank that cord. All right, finally I figured out what part of learning to live alone means: get real.

Buddies who are tool aficionados told me to buy Honda. I know they’re great machines; Honda actually builds their own, piece by piece and doesn’t outsource to China. I went into the dealership and priced the Hondas. Not on my budget. I looked at second-hand Honda genis, all of them pull-start. Then another buddy who’d been keeping his eyes out for me said, “Costco has a good deal on an electric start Firman geni right now. . .” So that’s what I went with.

I still have to fiddle a bit, as in turn on three switches, and if I hit the key fob and the geni’s cold, it won’t start until I noodle with the choke, as in, Slide the lever that turns the choke on. The second the geni starts, then it’s, Slide the lever that turns the choke off. Otherwise the motor coughs, sputters and hiccups instead of running smoothly.

It was then when I realized what buying a cheap knock-off of a Honda geni meant. The choke on my geni hides behind a tangle of wires. I’ve found myself outside in the bucketing rain, hanging upside-down peering at the back of the geni, growling, “Where the xxxx is that choke?” And when I couldn’t find it, I had to go inside, put on my glasses, and go back out and look again. When I finally located the choke behind the wires, I was so mad I took some surveyor’s tape, and looped around the geni lever so now I have a few inches of bright orange plastic hanging down to pull when necessary.

The sound of power! Yay! What a thrill.

Kira in the snow last year. She said it was very energizing.

Last week when the lights went out on Pender, the first outage of the season, my daughter texted, “Have you got your geni running?”

I groaned. I was in bed, reading with a headlamp. It was sheeting rain outside and gusting so hard that twigs and fir cones filled the air; I could hear them thumping on the roof. The last thing I wanted was to go out and try to pull the heavy geni out and try to find the choke. “No,” I texted back.

The thought came to me in the night, why stay with the old idea of wheeling the geni out as needed? Certainly I want to protect it from the weather but I’d given up on trying to get carpenters to make me a little wooden geni-shelter.

This week when I was waiting to pick Kira up from the vet, I stopped at the building supply and bought a small tarp and some bungee cords. At home, I got the geni out, levelled it as best I could, and plugged it in. I set it up so I can easily reach the back and front of the machine with all the levers that need to be adjusted. The heavy power cord needed another wrap of Gorilla tape where it was trying to part company with the plug. Finally, I put on the geni’s cover, wrapped it in the new tarp and secured it with bungee cords. With every motion of working, I thought about my dog and sent her love. It was like throwing out a rope and making that prayer a bridge between us. I’m not ready for you to go, I told her.

When I picked up Kira, the vet said he was very pleased with how easily the growths had come out.

Of course it helped that we had gone the Sunday before to the Blessing of the Animals at the Anglican church here on Pender Island. That was one of the suggestions and I said absolutely, this dog and I need all the help we can get!

Thank you so much to everyone who phoned, emailed or texted me words of encouragement about Kira. I was moved to tears by all that love. One kind friend even brought Ms Furface a blanket she’d crocheted! We should all be so lucky!

Actively praying while setting up a generator aren’t generally things a person might think of as going together. It wasn’t something I’d planned. What are your experiences around prayer? Do you even use the word?