Storm Notes

Here I was just last week writing about how beautiful the weather was, and then we spent the weekend crammed into a hallway with a bunch of pillows hoping our tiny house wouldn't be crushed. OK, not exactly, but our metro area had some mighty nasty weather this past weekend, and we were all caught a bit off guard.

Friday evening we had a little league baseball game, our first of the season (I'm the coach; my oldest son is on the team). The big discussion of the day was whether the rain would let up in time for us to play the game at 6:00. The clouds broke, the sun came out, and we played ball. We won 10 to 3, and the kids played really well. So the family came home in a good mood. Muddy cleats on the porch, showers, time for bed, the usual.

We put the kids to bed as the first major storm lumbered past us a few miles to the south. Shelle stayed with them in their room while I watched the weather both on TV and out the window. Reports were coming in of damage downtown and along an eastward corridor that kept looking like it should include us, but as I watched out the bedroom window, our big, drought-damaged trees barely waved.

Later, when Shelle came to bed, we continued to watch the shocking scenes of old buildings brought down by wind and sign and lamp posts twisted and torn, cars and trucks tossed and rolled down the highway like dice. We thought about our basement -- wet, low-ceilinged, probably ruled by some rodent monarch from a Stephen King story -- and wondered if the front hall wouldn't be safer after all.

We finally turned off the TV and went to sleep, but sometime near morning we were awakened by a horrible bang, loud as a shotgun blast. We both sat up in bed, and I realized in a moment the power was out. It had been raining hard but now there was a sudden, eerie silence. And then distant at first, a sound of wind, trees waving and the slight cracking of limbs. Gradually we were aware of a sound you hear about all your life: a steady droning, growing slowly in both volume and pitch. A sound like a freight train. There was almost no time -- mere seconds -- to react. I jumped out of bed and ran to the door to look outside, hoping for some visual confirmation I guess. The floor began shaking slightly, along with the pictures on the wall next to me. But looking out the window, I saw relative calm, not the torrid swirl of trees and brush I expected. Shelle was already getting up to get the kids when we heard a new sound, shocking, piercing, comforting: a train whistle. It was just the CSX, which comes through several times a night, and which we hardly notice any more.

We did actually spend Saturday afternoon under a tornado warning and crammed into the hallway. After Friday night, no one was taking chances, and the kids were all pretty scared. We're used to Spring storms around here, but I don't ever remember a storm where so many big, ostensibly strong structures were damaged by the wind alone. Usually we get a lot of trees knocked on top of things and low, weak structures blown apart. But this wind pulled bricks off of buildings and bent metal reinforcements. That's some serious shit right there.