February 13, 2021. It soon became apparent that we weren’t going to get electricity back any time soon. Looking up and down our rural road, there were trees lying down everywhere. Trees had lodged on the electric lines snapping them in two. We had always planned on getting a generator BEFORE an emergency, but now the race was on to get one during an actual outage that was supposed to last about a week given the number of people affected. However, there were about 50 trees down on the road, and we weren’t able to leave in either direction. All morning we heard the sounds of chainsaws. Finally, after seeing some traffic on the road, we headed into Corvallis around 1 pm to get a generator. The website of a chain home improvement store assured us there was one in stock.
I didn’t get many pictures because I was driving, but there were several places where we had to drive off of the main road and over onto the shoulder to go around trees that hadn’t been removed yet. Some of it was pretty dicey because some of the shoulders have a large drop off on one side. We also had to drive over some smaller trunks a few times after this point in the road. Luckily, several of our neighbors have chainsaws and were out making the roads passable again.
Corvallis, of course, no longer had generators. Luckily, we were able to find a good one in Eugene at Jerry’s Home Improvement Center that actually allowed us to pay for and reserve one by phone. The larger, unnamed national chains wouldn’t let us do that. By the way, when the advertising on the generator says that it quiet and only slightly louder than a vacuum cleaner. Realize, that they mean an industrial vacuum cleaner that could suck a horse off of the farm from 20 miles away.