On Being "Off the Grid"

Last week, we had our worst Winter storm so far this season. It started Tuesday evening around 8pm and got progressively worse through the night. The wet, heavy snow accumulated on everything, including on the pine tree branches above my tent.

At about 3am, the wind picked up and started blowing the accumulation from the tree limbs. My tent was bombarded with heavy slush-balls that made a loud "Pow!...P-Pow!...Pow!" as they crashed onto the rain fly. My lady, Jeanie, and our dog, Max, were spending the night, and we all three woke up and looked around as the bombardment began, trying to figure out what was going on. At first, I thought it must be tree limbs breaking and striking the tent, but it didn't really sound like that. Max was sitting up in the bed, fully alert, snapping his head from side to side as the slush-balls struck the tent over here, then over there, then over here again.

The bombardment continued on into the morning, and we had a hard time getting back to sleep. We finally gave up and crawled out of bed around 9am. As I put on the morning coffee, Jeanie mentioned that she'd have to call her daughters back home to see whether they'd lost power.

Fortunately, Jeanie's power was still on, but over the next few days I ran into plenty of people who had lost power due to fallen limbs and trees. And as I talked with people after the storm (people that weren't aware of my current lifestyle) they'd ask me: "Did you lose power?"

The first few times, I just said, "No, I didn't lose power", not wanting to get into long explanations. But that started bothering me a little because it wasn't exactly honest, so I tried, "Well, I'm not sure whether power went out in my area", which was closer to the truth, but led to questions like, "Oh? Where were you during the storm?" Oops. That didn't work, either, since I had to explain things anyway. Once I tried, "Well, I currently live in a tent without electricity", but that, of course, got me back into a long explanation.

Later that day, I came up with a nice, honest, short response: "I'm off the grid". There.

Being "off the grid" is something people have heard of and can relate to, unlike "living in a tent". When I say I'm off the grid I get questions like, "Really? Totally off the grid?", to which I respond with a simple, "Yep, totally", but that's it. No long discussion about tent living.

It's interesting that it never really occurred on me that I am, indeed, off the grid. It's been more of a byproduct of how I live than an objective. When one of my co-workers mentioned that he had always wanted to live off the grid (not knowing that I live in a tent), I said, "Well, it's pretty easy to do, but you have to make lifestyle changes". He said that he'd like to talk to me sometime about how I did it. So much for avoiding long conversations!