Light Bulbs

David L. Smith

May 15

What would life be like without them?

In the summer of '76, the year Linda and I were married, we went to the Cayo district in Belize so I could better appreciate where and how she'd lived for a year, teaching English to high school students under the auspices of the Papal Volunteer's—the Catholic church's version of the Peace Corps. We hired a taxi at the Chetumal, Mexico airstrip to drive us a hundred miles into the jungle. For hours, the only lights we saw were the taxi headlights on the deeply pitted dirt road and occasional kerosene lamps flickering through the trees.

Linda's dear friends were excited to reunite with her and they welcomed us to stay with them. That same night, a roach as big as my forefinger was on the sheet when Linda pulled back the blanket. And the fluttering I heard as I brushed my teeth in a basin, turned out to be a bat. I said I wanted to leave in the morning. But she informed me that there weren't any taxies in town, there was no bus that day and the only telephone line had been destroyed by the Maya burning their fields for planting. So I resigned myself to stay one more day. The next morning I stepped outside and into a jungle with dripping leaves, parrots, glistening lime trees and sparkling bright sunlight. I ran and got my camera. I was in photography heaven.

So what's that got to do with a lightbulb? Appreciation—for the gift of electric power and the lack of it. At that time, San Ignacio had neither televisions nor electric refrigerators. The town's electric generator shut down at ten o'clock after three hours of use in the evening, so as darkness approached our hosts, friends and Linda and I sat around a 60 watt bare bulb that hung from the ceiling on a wire. There was nothing to do but talk. As I remember it, these were less like conversations and more like family reports on who did what, who went where, when certain animals would be slaughtered for market, who said what to whom and what politicians were doing—or not doing. When the generator shut down the talk continued for another hour, kerosene lamp were lit.

The light bulb in this image evokes memories of that challenging and wonderful week, in particular an appreciation for the luxuries—and necessities—that electric power affords. I understand now, how the light bulb became the symbol for the word "idea." Now, instead of sharing the news and gossip of the day with family, friends and neighbors electricity allows us to converse, interact, connect, read and watch movies at night in the comfort of our well-lit air-conditioned homes. It's staggering to consider how much has been gained because of access to consistent, affordable and abundant electricity. Don't we notice, whenever it goes down for whatever reason, our appreciation awakens and grows with every passing hour?

But something has also been lost. We no longer sit together face-to-face in the evenings, sharing the close-in happenings of the day with family members, friends and neighbors. It's not that I miss what's been lost. But the light of that 60-watt bulb in San Ignacio, Cayo gave me a fresh appreciation for how people—and our not-to-distant relatives—managed and thrived without electricity. The light of that little bulb created a context, a call to gather without distraction and share face-to-face.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.