Brilliant (29 page)

Sometime after three in the morning, as in section after section of the city signs of a world coming to life again registered in little whirrings and tickings, faint and then full, the editor of
Life
magazine noted: "Ralph Morse, who had taken the first pictures of the blinded city from a 2 8th-floor window, now began to take the last pictures from the same position. Slowly, during the next 1½ hours, the city came alive again, a blaze of lights here, a blaze there.... Morse's camera caught the radiant rebirth."

***

That morning, subway workers had to comb all 720 miles of track before the trains could run again, just to make sure no one had fallen and lay injured on the rails or was lost and wandering along the lines. Gas crews went from house to house to check the pilot lights—which were powered by electricity—in the stoves and boilers of every customer. The current of weary people who'd spent the night in the train stations flowed past people coming to work again.

Perhaps it had been hardest on the old and the sick, who'd had a nerve-wracking time. For a few, the dark was fatal: one man was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft, still clutching the nub of a doused candle. For others, it was a night unlike any other in its generous and quiet beauty. Among those who spent hours playing cards and drinking whiskey or making small talk in dark offices and subway cars with people they sometimes couldn't even see, some struck up a camaraderie they would never have had by any other light. "Everybody recognizes everybody else now," one woman said. "Although they've seen me for ten years and they've done nothing but help me up the stairs, now it's a tip of the hat and a 'good morning, Phyllis, how are you today?'"

The lost hours eventually faded into a strange dream full of quirky things, though there were moments that would be intensely remembered afterward—of lighting grease pencils to see by, of being given coffee and pastries by transit workers while waiting in a darkened subway car, of the sheen of the moonlight on the side of a skyscraper.

The blackout of 1965 spurred the first serious examination of the electric grid and its fragility. The subsequent Federal Power Commission report, besides advocating extensive changes to the grid system itself—ones that were hoped would both strengthen the grid and confine future outages—recommended backup energy supplies for airports, hospitals, elevators, gas stations, and radio and television stations; auxiliary lighting for stairways, exits, subway stations, and tunnels; subway evacuation and traffic control plans. But even with such measures in place, in July 1977, when a series of lightning strikes sent an enormous surge through New York City's power system, circuit breakers—which were designed to reset automatically—failed to close, and the city was plunged into darkness again.

Although in many ways this outage was similar to the one twelve years before—the stalled subways and traffic, the gouging, the camaraderie among people stuck together, the kindnesses (restaurants set up tables on the sidewalk and stayed open; a bagpiper played in Grand Central Station)—the city was a different place, the age a different age. Unemployment among young men in some of the black and Hispanic neighborhoods exceeded 40 percent. The night was hot and muggy—sweltering—and the pale sliver of a new moon set before the lights went out at 9:34
P.M.,
so there was no consoling light reflecting off the skyscrapers, nothing but the torch on the Statue of Liberty to relieve the blackness. Looting broke out in all boroughs of the city, and arsonists set more than a thousand blazes. After a few hours, thieves even began stealing from the looters in a free-for-all that continued beyond the twenty-five hours it took to restore power. Police arrested thousands, and hospitals were swamped with people cut by knives and glass. Three people died in the fires, and a looter was shot dead. In a number of hospitals, the emergency backup systems, which had been made mandatory after the 1965 blackout, failed to work. Doctors stitched wounds by flashlight, and nurses resorted to squeezing air bags by hand for patients who were dependent on respirators.

In writing of it later, no one waxed poetic about the moon on the buildings. It was the looting that dominated people's thoughts. "We are in much worse trouble than we thought," commented a writer for
The New Yorker.
"In the blindness of that night, New York and America could see rage. We've been put on notice again. We may continue to ignore the terrible problems of poverty and race, but we must do so aware of the risks to both justice and peace."

The size of the machine that had become us had grown to be almost incalculable—some would say it was the largest machine in the world. Yet when it failed, societies were pervaded by the same feeling that those who had experienced the loss of gaslight in the nineteenth century had: of being vulnerable, of having given over control of our life. Russell Baker, writing in the
New York Times
after the 1965 blackout, imagined the ultimate fragility of the electric grid:

The end came on Sept. 17, 1973. It had been forecast by an M.I.T. undergraduate who had been running the law of probability through his computer.... The chain of events on that last day began at Shea Stadium at 4:43
P.M.
when the Mets finished a scoreless ninth inning against the Mexico City Braves, thus becoming the first team in history to lose 155 games in a single baseball season.... Two minutes later, Irma Amstadt, a Bronx housewife, turned on the kitchen faucet and noticed that there was no water. Going to the telephone, she dialed her plumber, not knowing that at that very moment, in defiance of probability, 6,732,548 other persons in New York were simultaneously dialing telephone numbers.... Mrs. Amstadt's call was the one that broke the system's back.

The grid can be as fragile as Baker imagined it to be. In August 2003, during hot weather and high demand, transmission lines—as transmission lines will do when they heat up—expanded and sagged all over the grid. In Walton Hills, Ohio, sagging wires touched some overgrown trees beneath them, which began a chain of events that plunged 50 million people in the eastern United States into the dark. It was the largest blackout in American history.

B
Y
1965,
THE SAME YEAR
as the Northeast blackout, New York artist Dan Flavin had turned to fluorescent light as the sole medium for his work. "Regard the light and you are fascinated—inhibited from grasping its limits at each end," he wrote in December of that year.

While the tube itself has an actual length of eight feet, its shadow, cast by the supporting pan, has none but an illusion dissolving at its ends. This waning shadow cannot really be measured without resisting its visual effect and breaking the poetry.... Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition. For example, if you press an eight foot fluorescent lamp into the vertical climb of a corner, you can destroy that corner by glare and double shadow. A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall.

For the next thirty years, Flavin used standard fluorescents in the available colors of blue, green, pink, red, yellow, and four kinds of white to explore everything about light save for its utility: the interplay of light and space, light and solids; the way colors mingled; the way glare and shadows dispersed solidity. He understood light as an endless and intricate medium for his work, yet he also knew that without the stability of infinite electrical connections, his works—like our own ordinary lights—were no more than heavy, inanimate objects made of glass and metal. "Permanence just defies everything," he once said. "There's no such thing.... I would rather see [my work] all disappear into the wind. Take it all away.... It's electric current with a switch—dubious.... And rust and broken glass."

Throughout the decades of Dan Flavin's career, the connections essential to his work became more and more dubious, and not only because of power outages. By 1973 the economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan relied on abundant, cheap oil. It fueled an insatiable car culture, yes, but oil was also essential to the energy grids of industrialized countries. For instance, it accounted for 20 percent of the fuel used for electricity generation in the United States. "Oil had become the lifeblood of the world's industrial economies," Daniel Yergin observed, "and it was being pumped and circulated with very little to spare. Never before in the entire postwar period had the supply-demand equation been so tight." Not only was there little to spare, but a good share of the oil consumed by the West and Japan was imported from the Middle East, and when Saudi Arabia instigated an oil embargo in the fall of 1973 in response to American arms shipments to Israel, fuel supplies tightened throughout the world. By December the price of oil, which sold on the world market for under $6 a barrel in early October, had nearly tripled in price.

Suddenly, as the country headed into winter, the "liberty poles" so valued by American farmers, and which seemed so strong and enduring in the landscape, proved to be entirely vulnerable. To conserve existing fuel supplies, President Richard Nixon, in addition to calling for restrictions on heating fuel and gasoline and setting lower speed limits on the interstates, called for the conservation of electricity. Specifically, Nixon called for the dimming of nonessential lighting such as advertisements and all decorative Christmas lights, both public and private, including the lights in New York City's Times Square. Although the electricity required for decorative lighting accounted for only 2 to 3 percent of all energy consumption in New York City, and lighting in general was responsible for about 6 percent of energy use nationwide, officials hoped that the dimming of such lights would encourage citizens to conserve energy in their own homes. "It's very sad to be a party to darkening a city so renowned for its lights—it's just heartbreaking," the municipal service administrator for New York City commented. "But it has a psychological effect, because it's difficult to get someone to turn down his thermostat if he sees lights blazing in a public place."

Although the shared and the celebratory—the flamboyant lights of advertising and the seasonal lights of the holidays—may seem to be the most dispensable of things in practical times, they draw our eyes out of the sea of lights we live in, and they take on outsize significance when doused, as if something essential has been taken away from the culture, especially in winter, when artificial light has always had its greatest meaning. And in 1973 their dimming
did
mean that something essential had been taken away, something larger than sheer illumination: the assumption that we could live without thinking about energy, that we could take it all for granted.

Writer Jonathan Schell understood that the damped-down world of the oil embargo was also a world whose underpinnings had profoundly changed: "This winter as the nation sits in its dimmed, chilled, living rooms watching the comet Kohouteck, which is due to appear in our heavens soon (it will be our finest Christmas ornament this darkened season)...the newly recognized global limits of natural resources ... force us and the Arabs and Europeans and the Japanese and all the rest of the peoples on the planet into dependence on one another. In the last analysis, the rationing we need is global."

And yet if the solution seemed to be global, it could also be personal. Who could blame some for wanting out, for following Helen and Scott Nearing back to the land and into "the Good Life," as did thousands of city dwellers in the late 1960s and early 1970s? The back-to-the-land movement was a response not only to the energy crisis of the time but also to the growing separateness from nature of modern life, with its inevitable interconnections. Poet Baron Wormser, along with his family, lived "off the grid" in the rural Maine woods for more than twenty years. As Wormser experienced it, the light of his kerosene lamps belonged to a different time, a different kind of evening. "Night's coming was so profound, so transfixing, so soft yet indelible that I was startled and lulled in the same awed moment," he wrote. "I remember very clearly feeling how, second by tiny second it was getting dark, how the dark was creeping in, how it was inexorable and delicate."

He acknowledged that he romanticized the same lamp that had been so eagerly buried by rural folks in the 1930s:

A few guests over the years found the stench appalling and the light feeble. As much as they wanted to be charmed, they weren't. I loved lying in bed and reading by the light of a small kerosene lamp. I was reading in the presence of an actual flame.... Time was steady, but in the flame's movements it varied.... It was a romantic glow.... The trembling light is quietly breathtaking. It causes soot and stench; it came from the hard work of mining, processing and trucking.... All true, but the feeling remains. Touch the glass chimney—it is hot with the heat that signals light.

However much he romanticized lamplight, Wormser also came to understand some of its costs and effort, which modern society at large would have to acknowledge sooner or later. "Light did not materialize itself," he wrote. "Our efforts each day made it happen. A match had to be struck. Our heedlessness had a limit."

Although Middle Eastern oil producers eventually lifted their embargo in March 1974, after Israel agreed to pull its troops out of the Sinai Peninsula, the price of oil remained higher than before the embargo, and the stability of fuel supplies fluctuated for years afterward. When President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he made energy independence a major goal of his administration. Carter, in a time before the widespread recognition of the effects of fossil fuels on climate, imagined exploiting the known coal reserves of the United States in order to alleviate the country's dependence on foreign oil. He also stressed conservation, appearing on television in a cardigan sweater and urging people to turn their thermostats down to 55 degrees at night, and he planned legislation that would foster the development of cleaner, more efficient energy generation.