My father would not borrow a ladder. If he needed one, he bought one, and if he couldn’t afford one, he backed the truck up to the house, stood on the tailgate and reached. My mother worried about that tailgate. My father said a man who borrows a ladder owes a favor, and a man who owes a favor isn’t standing on his own two feet, tailgate or no tailgate.
I think of him whenever somebody brings up the power grid. Most of Texas runs on its own grid, largely separate from the rest of the country. People from elsewhere say that like it’s a confession. I hear a family motto. Everybody else is hooked into one big shared arrangement, passing electricity back and forth like a covered dish. We set our own table.
I know the argument against it. When things go wrong here, there isn’t much of a line to the neighbors. If our plants stumble on a cold night, we can’t easily lean on anyone else’s. I’ve been told a bigger grid is a sturdier grid, the way a wide stance is harder to knock over.
I’ll grant that may be right as a matter of engineering. I just don’t think engineering is the question. The question is who you are. Being connected means being dependent, and being dependent means that someday a stranger in another state gets a say in whether your porch light comes on. I would rather that never happen, even if it means my porch light doesn’t come on.
That’s the part people don’t like to hear, so let me say it more gently. Freedom has a temperature, and some nights it’s a cold one. A man who will only be free when he’s comfortable hasn’t decided to be free. He has decided to be comfortable and found a nicer word for it.
Some folks tell me there’s a way to have it both ways, that a state can stand on its own and still plan for the bad night. Maybe so. But I notice the plan always arrives with a set of rules attached, and once you start following rules to keep the lights on, you’ve started following rules. My father would have known that for what it is. It’s a borrowed ladder with a fresh coat of paint.
So I’ll keep our grid the way he kept his tailgate. It’s ours. It’s a little shaky. When it gives out, we stand in the dark knowing it is our dark and nobody else’s. I’ll be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall for much the same reason. As near as I can tell, the other side would like our grid readied for the hard nights and leaning a little more on the neighbors, and I’d rather keep it ours.
My mother held that tailgate steady for him every spring. He always told people he did it by himself.
D. M.