What a difference a day makes! A scant few hours after I had finished the
last blog entry we had what meteorologists call a Derecho, which consists of straight-line
winds. In our case these winds were in
excess of 80 mph. This particular front
was 300 miles wide and we knew it was going to be a humdinger because we could
hear the sirens from fire and police right as the storm hit us. We stood in the front doorway and watched as
these strong winds bent the trees over sideways. The rain seemed to be blowing
in all directions at the same time and it was coming down hard. The storm lasted only about fifteen minutes
and we were thankful that we hadn’t had any damage or lost the electricity. Our thanks were premature and misplaced!
Upon waking in the night I realized that it was very, very
quiet; very, very dark; and very, very warm.
Being a bit of an accomplished detective it took me only a matter of
minutes to realize we had no electricity and therefore no AC. I felt it was only prudent to get up and
check to see if it was just a problem with the circuit breakers or a general
blackout. It was not the circuit
breakers. I tried to get back to sleep
but it was too hot and I wanted to walk around the house to see what the damage
was. I tiptoed out of the room, got
dressed and headed out to pick up the papers.
I noticed that a Bradford Pear in the neighbor’s yard had lost a large
branch but that seemed to be all the damage, which I felt was pretty lucky for us. My elation lasted until I stepped out onto
the back deck. The backyard looked like a tornado had ripped through it, and in
some ways it had.
We have a fence that encloses our backyard and along the
street side there were six Bradford Pear trees that the previous owners had
planted. These are beautiful fast growing trees that have lovely white flowers
in the spring, turn red and orange in the fall, and provide tons of shade and
privacy in the summer. What they don’t do well is weather strong storms. One of
these Bradford Pears was literally snapped off about four feet from the base of
the tree, breaking into four huge branches that each looked like its own tree
when on the ground … so spread out on the back lawn was thirty-five feet of
leafy green. As the tree came down it
took a large branch from another tree with it.
The winds must have been cyclonic since one of the branches somehow got
turned around 180º in the air and flew right into the deck railing where it was
wedged so tightly that I couldn’t move it.
Under all of this mess were various deck chairs and decorations that had
been blown off the deck. The day before
I had cleaned the entire back yard and now it looked like a train wreck.
Aside from losing the tree, we have lost a lot of shade and
privacy. No one could see into our
backyard before the storm: These trees
were so large and intertwined that, coupled with the fence, provided a green
wall of solitude. Now it looks more like
a Mike Tyson smile! The loss of the tree
made more than a few catbirds, mocking birds, robins and wrens homeless. They were flying all around the downed tree,
mostly looking for their young. Several
of the chicks died but there are three or four hopping around being fed on the
ground by their parents. There is a link
below to some photos, if it works, you can see that we tried to make the best
of our misplaced cocktail area.
I got out my trusty ten-year-old chain saw but there was no
way I could get that little thing to work.
I tried changing the spark plug and filled it with fresh gas but even
after I got it to start, it just wouldn’t continue to cut wood. Therefore I went out at 8 am to get some
water, coffee and a new chain saw. There
was exactly one left at Home Depot and it wasn’t one of the cheap ones. I ended up getting an Echo 18”
and two cases of half-liter bottles of water from Home Depot along with two
coffees and a cobblestone pastry at Panera’s.
Refreshed by coffee and calories, I tackled the mess in the yard. (First
he drove home, and one coffee and half the pastry were for me, of course! CCE) Meanwhile Cindy filled a very large
trash bag with hundreds of small sticks that were all over the yard. After about thirty minutes of massaging wood
with the Echo, I was bushed and so was Cindy.
It was already 90° and humid and we had to call it quits. There was really no place to cool off except
down in the basement, which is really a finished mini house with a bedroom,
living room, Bavarian corner with table and chairs for eating, full bathroom,
theater room and fireplace. It was still
74° there and that felt like air conditioning. We made plans to sleep there if
the juice wasn’t on by bedtime.
It is amazing how much we have come to rely on electricity.
One of the selling points of this house was the fact that all cables, electric
lines and other services are underground.
In truth we have had little trouble with the loss of electricity, but we
know that the storm went on to wipe out relay stations and transmission lines
all around the DC area, well into Virginia, Maryland, and our end of WV. We were reasonably sure that if we kept the
freezer and fridge door closed, things would stay cool for a while. I did go out to try to get ice but all of the
ice in Jefferson County had been sold hours before I got around to thinking
about it. Cindy took the perishable things
we knew we really would need from the fridge and assembled them in a
cooler. We had plenty of ice in the
icemaker to fill the cooler - setting aside a few Ziplocs bags of cubes for
cocktails, of course.
We managed to take navy showers with the remaining water and
dressed in light cool clothes, but the heat had already gone past 100° and it
was muggy and breezeless, so we just stayed in the basement for as long as
possible to keep cool. We assembled
leftovers, drank some pineapple juice with Myers’s rum and lime, and generally
decided that sweating at a picnic was normal.
Along about 9:00 pm the lights came on and you could hear a loud cheer
from all the neighbors. We ran around
closing windows, turned on the AC, and checked emails while the house cooled
down. By 9:30 everything was cool enough
for us to stop sweating and we were now confident that the juice would stay on
for the long run.
In the grand scheme of things all of this was just a minor
inconvenience; no one was hurt nor was the house damaged. It did give us a much better appreciation for
modern conveniences as well as reinforcing my firm belief that roughing it
should only refer to high quality hotels without 24-hour room service.
Ciao, Wm
The Storm
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