Early morning, city crews are closing traffic on Calle Libertidad and an intersecting residential street.
An old fashioned wood electrical pole is going to be replaced by a newer fiberglass model,and new electrical lines are being strung to provide more service to a nearby house under construction, a house directly across the street from us spectators. This old wood pole sticks up through the roof overhang of a home that was here before the road ever thought about coming this way.
The city crew starts around eight and right after lunch power is cut so linemen can scramble up poles and reattach new lines in place of old ones.
The men in hardhats, overseen by their supervisors, do their tasks in an orderly fashion.
Onlookers sit on front stoops and watch the men work, traffic finds other ways to bypass the scene,and pedestrians lift yellow tape and squeeze underneath to get to their casa’s on this little side street off the main thoroughfare downtown.
When power is restored there are sighs of relief and the new pole doesn’t touch the old house though there is still a hole in its roof that someone will have to patch.
Civilization, these days, still goes only as far as roads and electricity.
We are all hooked up to all kinds of grids even if we only see a few of them.
Electric is civilization’s lifeblood.
Unplugging, for some, is a death sentence.
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