Phooey Kerflooey vs The Deep, Deep Dark
What’s Real?
Broken Generators and Deep Darkness
Our family lives off-grid at a remote Bible camp. This means that if we want electricity, we must turn on a generator. A generator is a machine that runs on some kind of fuel (ours uses diesel) to produce electricity. There is also a bank of batteries that the generator charges. The batteries store up extra electricity so that we have power for a few hours after we turn off the generator. However, things break on the generator and batteries all the time and we are often plunged into darkness.
When our boys were little, the large camp generator broke for two whole months. So, we ran extension cords through our window and plugged them into a small generator so that we could run our refrigerator and oven for a few hours each day. For one hour a day, I unplugged the fridge and plugged in our TV and DVD player so that the boys could have some screen time.
One day, the small generator had some kind of power surge. The DVD player started smoking! We unplugged it really fast, but the inside of it had melted! That DVD player was completely ruined!
I learned to cook in the dark using a headlamp and we read books by flashlight. Thankfully, the generator was soon fixed!
When the darkness is complete, due to the generator failing or simply us turning off all the lights, God’s lights in the sky shine brightest of all. The stars and the moon are so bright where we live! To get to our house and the camp where we work, you have to drive up a paved road into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, then you drive up a tiny and twisty paved road, then you turn onto a gravel road, and then you turn onto a dirt road! Out here in the forests and meadows, the sky is filled with a brilliant sea of stars. We can even see the Milky Way, which is a glittering arm of stars that stretches across the heavens! There is incredible beauty in the darkness, if one is willing to let go of their fear and see the amazing things God has made.
Just like in Phooey’s adventure, we also have crickets who sing at night, bats that flutter around catching bugs, and owls who hoot back and forth to each other in the dark. We have a pair of great horned owls that live near our home, which is a log house that my Grandpa Delbert and Grandma Autumn built from trees they chopped down themselves! I even skinned the bark off of a tiny part of one log when I was four or five years old. So I helped build the house, too!
Phooey’s fear of darkness was based on our second Newfoundland dog, Princess Leia Freyja, and how she would not go potty at night unless you came with her and guarded her while she pottied. She wouldn’t even go if I stood on the porch and cheered her on. Nope, Leia needed me right there beside her. Just in case of roving bears, I suppose. She wasn’t very brave, but we loved her very much!
Now, if you want to read about the real wheelchair jumping, squirrel attacks, and puppy stories that went into writing the first two books in the Phooey Tales: Spring series as well as my book for readers ages 9-12 from Marcus’s POV called Phooey Kerflooey, then click the button below. Happy reading, my friends!