There are small mysteries of homeownership, and then there are large ones.

A small mystery might be why, for instance, a kitchen sink chooses the night of a big party to start leaking, or why a particular nail in a particular floorboard keeps popping up, no matter how many times – or how deeply – you set it.

Last week, we encountered one of the large ones: why is there no electricity in the house?

We’d been away for a few days, and come home to find things in a bad way. The living room was dark and cold, which, in itself, wasn’t so strange, but the digital clocks in the kitchen were out. The discoveries spiraled from there. Fridge: dead. Phone: dead. Overhead lights: you get the idea.

On went the mucking boots; next stop, the panel in the basement.

That’s when I made another exciting discovery. Six inches of water in the basement, thanks to the dead sump pump.

I splashed my way over to the panel. The main breaker looked fine, but I’d been fooled by circuit breakers before. Sometimes, they’ll still look “on” when in fact they’ve been tripped.

The remedy is to reset the breaker by flipping it all the way to “off,” then all the way to “on” again.

This is not a savory prospect when the breaker you’re contemplating by flashlight is the 200 amp main. And you happen to be standing ankle-deep in water.

It was time to retreat – at least for the moment – and consider my options. Happily, as I shook off my boots and took a few deep breaths to clear my mind, I heard the rumble of my neighbor’s New Holland tractor on the lane.

Worry was written all over my face as I approached.

“Howdy, neighbor!” he cried.

“Buddie!” I said, “do you have power?”

Buddie did, in fact, have power, which only deepened the mystery. His house is the last one on the lane. Which meant that there was definitely power in the lines running past our house.

“Hm,” he said, “that’s odd. Did you pay your power bill?”

Good thought, but yes, we’d paid the bill.

“Did you check the fuse by the transformer?”

This was the kind of cool, analytical thinking that typifies the man. It’s what helped us solve the Enigma of the Rough-Riding Pickup Truck of 2009 and the Riddle of the Strangely Low Water Pressure in 2010. And now he was sinking his teeth into the Great Power Outage of 2011.

We walked down to the power pole and, sure enough, the fuse above the transformer was hanging down like loose tooth.

“That’ll do it,” he said.

I thanked him, then put in a call to PPL. I described the hanging fuse to the customer service representative. “Hm,” she said, “did you find the squirrel?”

We hadn’t found a squirrel, but we’d learned that there’d been a big lightning storm earlier in the week. Perhaps there’d been a surge in the line that had popped the fuse.

This was not good news. Some of the electronics in our house were protected by surge suppressors, but not most of them. If lighting had caused a major power spike, we might be looking at a serious expense.

Less than half an hour later, a PPL truck crept up the lane. The driver was an experienced hand. He took one look at the popped fuse and asked, “Did you find the squirrel?”

I shook my head. “Oh well,” he said. Then he went up in his bucket to check it out. He spent a long time taking readings of the transformer. He didn’t reset the fuse. Instead, he started pulling wires.

“Transformer’s shot,” he said, when he was back on the ground.

“How long will it take to replace it?” I asked. I could practically hear the water rising in the basement.

“Two hours or so,” he said.

Exactly two hours later, another PPL truck pulled up – a crew of two this time. With great efficiency and a minimum of palaver, they replaced the bum transformer and reset the fuse.

There followed the sweet gurgle of the sump pump, and then, one by one, the pings, chimes, and quiet whirs of a modern house waking from electronic slumber.

The cleanup could finally begin. I took a walk down towards the creek to gather my strength. About two hundred yards from the lane, I came across a something strange in the grass. It looked like a twisted black penny loafer stuffed with bleached animal bones.

I’d found the squirrel. Either it had been launched like a rocket-propelled rodent by the force of the explosion, or a scavenger had dragged it across the yard, only to reject it for being overcooked.

In any case, mystery solved.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 07 April 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com