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Empty Nest Syndrome

by Eva Murray

This is not about my children growing up and leaving. This is about the kids who, as we have joked for years, never will move out. The perennial toddlers in my family’s life are, like most of their ilk, extremely noisy. They are a bit messy and need a fair amount of looking-after and once in a while they sort of…drip things. They require hiring a babysitter if their responsible adult takes even the shortest trip away from home, they do not care for thunderstorms, and once in a great while they behave quite irrationally. They are also green.

Detroit Diesel “alpine green.”

Matinicus Plantation Electric Company (or “Electrical Company” on some of the paperwork, as the outfit’s earliest administrators paid little heed to the conventions of grammar,) is one of the nation’s smallest utilities. Neither a private enterprise nor a co-op, our tiny municipally-owned power company is a self-contained micro-grid, providing electricity to the hundred or so ratepayers of this remote island only. There is no cable from the mainland to this island; there is just our little generating station near the harbor, housing three engines and related equipment. I’ve spent a fair bit of time inside that powerhouse.

The company, first called Matinicus Light and Power (or Power and Light; people don’t seem to remember exactly) was formed sometime in the mid-1960s and started out pretty primitively, from what I hear, with a series of different experiments. There was something about a couple of old beat-up Civil Defense engines, and a Fairbanks-Morse not bolted down properly which threw a rod once and chased John Corrao out of the building. Before that, any homeowner who wanted electricity – say, for television – had to start up his own generator in a backyard shed. Most year-round homes had a generator.

In 1982 or thereabouts the entire works, from guts to bookkeeping, was updated. Three new Detroit 3-71 engines and generators were purchased with efficiency in mind: when demand was low, they could run just one. When electrical demand increased, we could have a second engine come on the line and parallel with the first (if you want to know what “parallel” means, look it up; there is some interesting physics in electricity, and a good case for paying attention in trigonometry class). Automated switchgear was installed to call up and shut down engines as demand required, meaning a human being did not have to be right there to start an engine at random times of the day. A third engine provided redundancy so that if any engine were out of service for maintenance, the island still got all the kilowatts it required.

…which isn’t many.

I have tried to explain the size of this infrastructure to smart fellows off-island and the response is often something between incredulity and an argument. One guy actually told me to my face that I didn’t know what I was talking about. “Sixty kilowatts? There is no such place! You’ve got your math wrong!” No, I haven’t got my math wrong. Average kilowatt output at any given point in time is generally between 30 and 80 kWh, depending on time of year and time of day. 100 kilowatts would be a seriously heavy demand out here. Total capability of the power plant is probably something approaching 200 kW, but we never need anything close to that. We still have three Detroits making the electricity for the island--rebuilt or replaced since 1982, to be sure, and one of them is a 4-71 now-- but they are still what you’d call “old technology.” (Before you ask the obvious next question about wind power, yeah, we can talk about that in another column. Remember that unlike us, Vinalhaven has a cable to the mainland and so is part of the larger grid. Yes, that matters.)

Paul Murray, with whom I share a home and a life and an attentiveness to this little town’s electricity, operates the station now. He’s had the job more or less alone since Charlie Pratt died in 2000. Before Pratt was the station operator, a few others took their turns at the job, most of them fishermen, some of whom gave a damn more than others. Doug Murray took it on in the 1970s when he was supposed to be retired for ill health; instead, he ran the station for the rest of his life. This business of passing on the job only upon death is not a wonderful precedent. It doesn’t allow for much of a training period for the new guy.

Soon, the powerhouse is to have a new primary operator. The idea is to avoid that particular awkward transition (ie. station operator works alone until he’s carried off the island) and have two guys who can care for the noisy green children, and figure out the ghosts in the old machine, and know what it means when the indicator lights blink on for “overcrank” or “failure to parallel,” and possibly even understand the trigonometry. More to the point, two guys to make haste to the station when the lights go out.

The duty comes with a ball and chain, in a sense, as the operator cannot leave the island without a substitute. Soon, the new guy will be the one with the day-to-day obligation to the babies, and Paul will be only the helper (and the institutional memory). Maybe now Paul can plan that hiking trip, or ride that train out west. Still, it feels very odd—perhaps not to Paul, who encouraged this change, but for me, who has no official position with the power company…except for feeling more or less related to it.

I’m worried I may experience a bit of the “empty nest” once the new guy gets confident and established as the station operator, and the system frequency and voltage read-outs disappear from my kitchen wall. The power company and the mechanical parts thereof—the old Detroits and their associated generators, the switchgear panels filled with dials and gauges and electronics, the fuel system, the seven or so miles of overhead wires, the line truck-- and that invisible ball-and-chain as well—have been a part of my life for years. For as many years, I reckon, as my children were kids at home needing milk and cookies from mommy. I understand how things work in a general sense (though I’m still working on the trig). I have been one of the substitutes. I do the daily check when Paul is busy on another job, I read the meters when they need somebody who doesn’t mind striking out on snowshoes, and I know how to drive the bucket truck. I wake up, just like he does, when the phone rings or the pager tones out because a tree branch has brought a line down in a storm or some bit of elderly equipment has decided to act weird. I am used to the needs of the power company. I am inured to its foibles and familiar with its demands. I respect the obligation; it’s something like being an emergency responder on duty, or, if you’ll pardon the mushy stuff, a parent. I rather enjoy working in the crowded little station, wearing one of the hearing-protection headsets that hang near the door, my hair tucked safely down the back of my shirt as I bend cautiously between engines to write down a reading from an oil usage meter.

I hope the new guy lets me help out once in a while. Maybe he won’t like snowshoeing.

Have you seen those “mother’s rings” with the birthstones for all of your children? I think I ought to have one with an emerald for my daughter, a tourmaline for my son, and a dot of Detroit Diesel alpine green paint right in between.