We can’t get from here to there when the power goes out. Plunge us into darkness and we’re lost.

During the 2003 Northeastern power failure millions of people in New York City milled around like lost sheep, wondering how they would get home to their loved ones. Nothing moved. Businesses closed. Subways stopped running.

Eventually the masses began hiking across the bridge, hoping to make it home on foot. Others bedded down at the curbside all night. I wonder where they all went to the bathroom?

It takes a massive power failure to make us appreciate our ancestors. They traveled to this new land in covered wagons, forging the land with nothing but their bare hands. There were no paved highways, road signs or rest stops along the way. They didn’t need a bridge to get from one side of the stream to the other.

What if it had been up to us to be the first pioneers to come to America? We wouldn’t have been able to steer the horses northward without a cell phone and MapQuest to show us the way. Take down the street signs and we’re lost. I don’t think those wagons were equipped with shock absorbers and air conditioning. Imagine the stink comin’ off those sweaty horses?

Sometimes I’m too lazy to drive to the corner store. Imagine having to hoof it on horseback to the grocer twenty miles distant?

I like my chicken wrapped in cellophane. I cannot picture myself running through the backwoods with a rifle slung over my shoulder, hunting down my supper. If Cholera didn’t get me, wild coyotes would.

They didn’t have chain saws and bulldozers back then. If I were lucky enough to have a cabin and fresh dinner dangling over my shoulder, I wouldn’t be able to start a cooking fire without my trusty bag of briquettes. The only “lighter fluid” back then was a chunk of dried up horse plop, but let’s not even go there, okay?

I try to envision myself gutting and skinning my lunch, but my mind draws a blank. The image is simply too horrifying to comprehend.

Firewood had to be hauled, cut and split by hand. Though I can make a decent cup of coffee in an old fashioned steel pot, I’d first have to stoke a fire in the woodstove. It would take hours before the coffee perked. I’d die.

I’d probably help the other ladies prepare lunch for the barn-building men-folk. Not only would I have to make the potato salad but I’d also have to grow my own potatoes. Did they have jars of mayo back then? Can you imagine canning your own fruits, veggies, jams and jellies, and baking your own bread? I can’t even toast a Pop Tart without charring the edges.

There is no way that I would eat an egg after seeing it pop out of you-know-what. Somehow it’s different when the eggs are already cleaned and sitting in a Styrofoam tray.

I would make pets out of the livestock and give them names. I would never be able to slaughter Pete the pig or wring Chucky the chicken’s neck. The PETA people would finally love me.

It would be nice having the doctor come to me when I was sick. With my luck I’d get Dr. Mangala with a dirty syringe. I wonder what qualified someone to be a doctor back then? On second-thought I probably don’t want to know.

An Indian wouldn’t have to attack me with a tomahawk. He’d only need stick his head through the cabin door. I’d drop dead from fright.

Thank God it wasn’t up to me to pioneer the new land. America wouldn’t exist today.