CLEARWATER - Does electricity make a sound when it stops coursing through a house? Roberta Hoopes was asleep when it happened at 7 a.m. Sunday. The sound of something not happening woke her up.
"I figured that was it," she said.
An hour later the lights flickered on for a tantalizing moment. Then Hoopes heard a pop and they went out again. That really was it.
Hundreds of thousands of bay area families lost power over the Labor Day weekend, thanks to Frances' endless swirling wind and driving rain. But Hoopes and her neighbors on Woodside Avenue can legitimately say they were among the first to lose it - a distinction that felt less and less like an honor by Monday night.
People on the thickly wooded suburban street passed the dark hours playing more rummy than anybody really wants to play and looking yearningly toward Druid Road for Progress Energy trucks that never arrived. Food went bad, and so did people who couldn't shower.
Still, everybody agreed things could have been worse, and more than one person used the word "adventure" when talking about the experience. Amanda Miller, 7, and her brother Robbie, 6, the undisputed Lego king of Woodside Avenue, earned a dollar each picking up sticks with their dad.
Next door, Kristine and Richard Urea probably would have finished clearing the yard in an hour. But they had the help of their 2-year-old twins, Hudson and Brianna, so the job took twice as long.
Lacking air conditioning and anything to do, lots of people wandered outside and talked to their neighbors, whom they maybe knew and maybe didn't. Nan Englishbee kept her refrigerator going with an extension cord strung across the street from the home of a sympathetic neighbor with power.
Lots of people stopped to commiserate with Jason Worden, who lives on the corner, about the big tree that fell over and landed right where he parks his car, except his car wasn't there when it happened and neither was he. Worden rode out the worst of the storm with a friend and came home to find his parking place taken.
Worden, who is single, wasn't worried about the power outage because he has only beer and milk in the fridge anyway.
Mike Miller was sitting in his garage several houses away when he heard Worden's tree fall.
"Sounded like a gunshot," he said.
The excitement was just starting. About that time, a power pole caught fire in his next-door neighbor's back yard.
It was a spectacle, and it gave everybody a story to tell.
"You could see the electrical current burning and burning," Miller said. "You could see it work its way down the pole."
Leon Gauvreau is the next-door neighbor, so let him finish the story.
"Finally it burned down to where one of the wires fell," he said, "and when it did that it blew out the whole street."
Gauvreau's daughter and son-in-law and their helpful twins were visiting from Lake Worth, in Palm Beach County, where Frances roared through when it was still a hurricane. The Lake Worth house had power on Monday. Go figure.
The Gauvreau house was darker than most on Woodside Avenue, because the windows are boarded up and are going to stay that way until Leon sees what Hurricane Ivan has in mind.
Back at the Hoopes residence, across the street from the Gauvreaus', Roberta and her husband, Ray, were looking forward to an evening out. They had been invited to dinner at a home with lights. They would be joined by their daughter, Carol Way, in town for her 25th class reunion at Clearwater High, and Roberta's 90-year-old mother, who has always been known as GrandmaRuth. One word.
Roberta Hoopes was asked whether she has a philosophy about getting through inconveniences like the power outage. At first she said something about making lemonade out of lemons. But after she thought about it, she told a story about just sitting in the house during the storm, watching the wind trash the shrubbery in the back yard.
