How did Chappaquiddickers handle power outages in the past? Some dealt with it by not depending on it in the first place.

Back in the second half of the ‘60s, my family and our cousins rented the Self’s compound on Shear Pen Pond for the entire summer. We rented out our house on Simpson’s Lane while we were out at Cape Poge. There were fewer structures on the Self estate back then but they accommodated our whole gang of a dozen in various cabins and dormitory wings.

The only connection between Cape Poge and civilization was a telephone wire running from the Dike Bridge, sometimes under the sand, sometimes on top. During rainy northeasters, the static caused by corroded connections made the telephone useless. There was just one phone. It was on the kitchen wall of the main house. There was an extra bell on the outside of the building so that you could hear when you were out on the deck or terrace or even out on the pier. People calling knew to let the phone ring several dozen times to give you a chance to get inside.

There were propane gas lamps throughout every structure, fed by copper tubing running from pairs of 100-pound tanks that had to be hauled out from the Dike. Each lamp had an on-off lever, a glass globe and a mantle. The mantle was a fiberglass mesh globe that corralled the gas so that it could mix with the oxygen in the air and burn with a bright glow. After the first lighting, the mercury sizing burned off the mantle and left behind a very delicate structure of ash.

You had to be very careful when lighting the lamp not to touch the mantle or to let too much gas accumulate before igniting which would cause a tiny explosion which would blow the mantle apart. The lamps didn’t work without the mantle. We bought mantles by the dozens.

The cooking stove was propane. The burners had their pilots disabled, so were lit with a match. By the end of the summer, you either refused to light them for fear of burning your fingers again or you had figured out the way to do it without burning your fingers and others would be begging you to do the lighting for them. We re-lit the oven pilot before each use so as not to waste gas.

The refrigerator was also gas. Imagine making cold from a propane flame. Calling it cold was kind of a stretch. More like very chilly. It didn’t make ice.

The water well pump was gasoline powered and filled a 200-gallon pressure tank. We ran it once a day. Twice, if we had company or did laundry. The washing machine was a plain old 110-volt model that ran off the noisiest generator that I have ever encountered. We only ran those two when desperate for clean sheets. There was one big water heater for the whole place.

The only way that we knew that the power was out in town during a big storm was that it was pitch dark at night except for a few tiny twinkling lights and the red blinker in the Edgartown harbor lighthouse. That’s probably the first sign to Cape Poge dwellers now that the power is out on the islands since they are still completely independent from the power grid.