Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/11/2022 (205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the lights went out on Sunday night, I was halfway through a book I’d started that morning, not intending to finish it in one sitting but having been seduced, without my realizing, deep into the story. The book was Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It’s a special book, a beautiful piece of writing. It’s also very hard to describe.

The book’s main character is the titular narrator. We meet him as an inhabitant of a strange world, a labyrinth of vast halls lined by statues, a labyrinth that contains mysteries and oceans. We learn the world as he explores it; I won’t give too much away. Only to say it’s about how innocence is a matter of perspective, shaped by the walls of where we are contained.

So I too was lost in the book’s great halls on Sunday night, when the real world, or at least the part of Osborne Village outside my window and much of Winnipeg beyond, suddenly went dark. In the silence, no more gentle refrigerator hum, I listened to the sounds of feet stumbling through nearby suites, as neighbours searched for what went wrong.

I tried to go back to my book. I lit a candle, but it didn’t throw off enough light to reach the page. Annoyed at being stolen from the world I’d been exploring, I turned on my phone instead. Across social media Winnipeggers were figuring out the extent of the Hydro outage, reporting in from across River Heights. (In all, over 29,000 customers were affected.)

For a minute I took mental stock of my blankets. I wondered how cold things would get if the power stayed gone. I’d never really wondered that before. Electricity animates almost every minute of our lives, and yet it flows around us as a phantom, an answer to a rarely-asked question. Most of us only really think about it when it’s absent.

Once, a Free Press photographer and I drove north, up to Gillam, to see the great dams over the Nelson River. We learned how their construction disrupted the environment and the lives of the Fox Lake Cree who live there, and who’d lived there long before the energy of the north was yoked and harnessed and driven south, to feed a power-hungry city.

It was a strange place to be. A river that makes possible city life, and one most Winnipeggers will never see.

The power was still out in my apartment. Six minutes. Seven. I texted friends who also sat in darkness. I thought about my friends on the other side of the ocean: last month, Russia began attacking Ukraine’s power grid. There’s no military reason for it; the goal can only be to force millions more refugees into the rest of Europe and bring Ukraine to its knees.

The first barrage on Kyiv came on a Monday morning in mid-October, in the middle of rush hour at a juncture in the war when most residents of the capital no longer took shelter during sirens. It wasn’t flippancy. It’s just that you’d be amazed what people can become accustomed to, and besides, you can’t put your life on hold forever.

But that morning, explosions boomed over the city. One missile hit a playground in a park, another a busy intersection, and a third clipped the edge of a pedestrian bridge that winds across a valley overlooking the Dnipro River, a pet project of Kyiv mayor Vitaly Klitschko. In August, I’d spent a peaceful hour at that spot, marvelling at the view it gives of the water.

Seven civilians died and 49 were injured in that attack. One of the dead, Oksana Leontyeva, was a pediatric cancer doctor, and a widow. She’d just dropped her son off at kindergarten and was driving to the hospital when a missile exploded near her car. The strikes aimed to destroy the city’s electricity; they snuffed out so much more than that.

Attacks on the energy grid came again the week after, and the next. By this week, nearly 4.5 million people in Ukraine were spending some or all of their days without power, with the worst situation near the capital. And no electricity can also mean no water, the lack of which, especially in dense urban areas, can push an emergency into a spiralling crisis.

Winter is coming. Temperatures are dropping. Next week, the daily lows in Kyiv are expected to fall below freezing. A city of nearly three million cannot endure that without heat and with questionable water, so just this week journalists reported that officials are drawing up plans for a mass evacuation of Kyiv. It may never happen. But it’s within the range of possible.

“If you come back, bring a flashlight,” a friend there texts me. “And pack light, in case we have to leave.”

I admire his advice. Frank, enduring, practical. In photos, the once-bustling streets of old Kyiv sit silent now, buildings cast as dim silhouettes against the moonlit slate of the sky. Journalists in the capital share tips about cafés that still have energy, or marvel at others that, without power, still somehow manage to serve coffee and avocado on untoasted bread.

You’d be amazed what people can become accustomed to. Until they can’t.

Suddenly, my reverie ends. Ten minutes after the lights went out on Sunday they flashed back on in my apartment, and in all the other apartments on my block, and the street lamps outside. Already I was so accustomed to the dark that I had to squint my eyes. Just a brief intermission, technical problems, nothing had ever truly been in danger.

I’d always been safe. My apartment was still warm. I went back to my book.

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And I thought about the work, unseen to most, that brought our power back online in about as much time as it had taken me to ascertain why it had gone out. I thought about the comforts of a world in which, confined to the parts that provide, I never have to think too much about how it’s made. I thought about the peace that protects such wondrous things as light.

I thought about where that power had come from, shivering up from the currents of confined rivers, trapped and sent south over forests and fields, sent south and spreading into the mesh that covers our lives, enabling almost every way we now rely on to connect with each other, to take care of ourselves, to pass our hours, to just be.

For the rest of that night, while my refrigerator hummed, I tried to lose myself again in the vast halls of Piranesi’s world. I tried to lose myself in a novel that explores how we can be innocent to the truth of things, so long as we can only see them from a confined perspective, sheltered in halls that sustain us enough to conceal the pain inside the walls.

Then it dawned on me: I did not need to wonder. I was born in such a place. I’ve lived in it for my entire life.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

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