Water’s gonna overflow, swamp’s gonna rise

It wouldn’t be a hard stretch of the brain to imagine Cooter Hollow as some sort of magical place where Cheap Chinese Generators go to die, or at least succumb to our own peculiar style of enhanced interrogation. Historically, when we’ve needed a generator, it’s because the one before it finally keeled over, unexpectedly, and is generally timed to our periods of maximum insolvency. Savings accounts have still yet to be discovered here, although there’s a big bag of money lying around here somewhere, if we can just remember where we put it.

But Cheap Chinese Generators are fine for many things, including being taken out of the three-car-garage twice a year when the power goes out, and strapped to the top of your car with the family dog when you go camping. But up here, we beat on them more heavily than that. For a year and a half, we powered our camp directly from one, every day, which makes a Cheap Chinese Generator cry for its mother, then proclaim its brothers to be against America. Trust me on this.

So there we were, a couple of weeks ago, at the Expensive Japanese Generator shop, in line for a shiny new bauble, not connecting the necessary dots to know that with the hurricane expected the next day, there would be a run of people with a thousand bucks to burn to ensure they didn’t miss an episode of their favorite reality television program. But of course this was the case: others have discovered savings accounts, or at least, credit cards, and we were stuck without. As we’re not folks to return empty-handed from such an excursion, we dropped our bucks instead on things to read and things to shoot, like good societally ejected would-be intellects. And with that, we returned to our paralyzed– but not yet dead– Cheap Chinese Generator.

The next day, of course, all hell broke loose, if “all hell” is defined as all the roads, bridges, culverts, and any other way out of town. Also, the electrical substation in town, many homes, and many many acres of land. (Cooter Hollow itself is high on the mountain, remember, and survived the worst of it). My Native proved himself some sort of Generator Whisperer, or at the very least, kicked it in just the right place, and it’s been running smoothly since, taking care of business up here, as well as traveling around to help friends and neighbors keep the e. coli from coming out to play in their frozen foods.

And, just so this post is not entirely without a proper documentarian treat, our power situation is now: The Cheap Chinese Generator, which charges a bank of 4 deep-cycle batteries through this inverter charger. I’m sure My Native will be calling within minutes of this post to let me know that this information is misleading and rickety and bad, and will insist I issue a retraction. Stay tuned!

(Also, look at those beans! I don’t know if they’re any good; they’re called Vermont Cranberry beans, they seemed to grow well, and I will never pass on the opportunity to grow pink food. The Big Garden has been sorely neglected through our little natural disaster, though I’m limping back into it, and seem to have grown my weight in edamame.)