Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?

Ask anyone who was here in August of 1991 and you'll get a number.

Four days. Nine days. Eleven. Everyone remembers exactly how long their power was out, the way people remember birthdays, and no two of them agree. That's the part that gets us. Thirty-five years on and the whole Lower Cape is still quietly holding a slightly different version of the same week.

Hurricane Bob crossed Block Island around half past one on August 19, 1991, and made landfall near Newport shortly before two. According to the National Weather Service's record of the storm, coastal towns took sustained winds of 75 to 100 miles an hour. Gusts hit 125 in Brewster and North Truro, and North Truro recorded the highest sustained wind anywhere — a flat 100. Bob drove a surge of 10 to 15 feet into Buzzards Bay, with the worst of it, 12 to 15 feet, at Onset, Bourne, Mashpee and Wareham at the head of the bay. More than 60 percent of residents across southeastern Massachusetts and southeastern Rhode Island lost power.

Then it was over, and everybody had a week to fill.

The part the weather service didn't record

Not what the storm did. What you did.

Where you were standing when it went dark. What you cooked, and on what — the grill, the fireplace, the camp stove somebody's father had kept in a shed since Korea. Whose freezer you raided before it turned. Who ended up sleeping at your house, or whose house you ended up sleeping at, and how long that got funny before it stopped being funny.

What you lost. What you found afterward in a yard that wasn't yours, and whether you ever gave it back.

And the number. How many days. Because we'd like to see how many different answers come back from the same four towns.

If you were nine that August

We especially want yours.

A week with no power, in August, when you're nine years old, is not a natural disaster. It's the best thing that has ever happened to you. No television. Everyone outside. Neighbors you'd never spoken to standing in the road at dusk with flashlights, comparing notes. Somebody's uncle cooking on a Coleman for eleven people.

Plenty of adults on this Cape lost boats and roofs and income that week, and seventeen people up and down the eastern seaboard lost their lives. Both things are true at once, and we'd rather print both than flatten either.

If you got here after

That's a story too.

Everyone who moved to the Lower Cape after 1991 has been told about Bob by somebody who was here — usually within their first year, usually unprompted, usually while looking at a tree. If you've been handed that story, send us the version you were handed, and who handed it to you.

How to send it

Just hit reply. Your answer comes straight to us.

Please include:

• Your first name and last initial

• Your town — where you were in August 1991, and where you are now if it's moved

• Whatever the memory is worth. A paragraph. Three sentences. Short is fine. Short is usually better.

Say the word and we'll leave your name off. If you've got a photograph from that week, send it — a few of them are going to run.

Next Thursday we'll put them together and print them the way you wrote them, credited by name and town. Not summarized. Not tidied up.

One last thing, and it's the important one. If somebody in your life has a Bob story and doesn't do email — a parent, a neighbor, the man who's been cutting your grass since the first Bush administration — go ask them, write it down, and send it in under their name.

Those are the ones that disappear.