Storm of the Century

Storms. Some of us are scared to death of them (astraphobia) – for good reason – and some of us love them. I had a friend who was petrified of storms; but then she had survived a hurricane while in a small, rickety motorhome (a.k.a. old RV). I love storms, but I respect them. (“As long as no one gets hurt” is my storm motto.) Their potential to cause damage is a real factor, at the same time, all that power and wind and lightening gives me a sense of the glory of nature – and what must be the hugeness of God. While it reminds me of how small we are, it also frees me somehow. Frees my soul; I want to soar with all that power. Strange, I suppose, because even the animals and birds are smart enough to bed down and hope for survival. Maybe it shows a piece of me that I don’t know. A longing to do more, climb higher, see my potential. Maybe I’ll have to do another blog on it.

My feelings of storms did alter a teensy bit after the storm of 2010. When you are in bed watching TV and it suddenly dawns on you that there have been constant lightning flashes going on outside for some time (fascinating how your brain figures things out before you do), and you go to switch to the weather channel to see if any warnings have been put out, but the TV (and the light) blacks out, then you look out the window and see the trees swaying so much that it looks like they could end up touching the ground – or break the tree in half, you – with your brain’s help – can sort out that this is not a normal thunderstorm. It’s the mother of all storms… My husband and I looked at each other that night, and I said, “Do you think we should go in the basement?” (There was a definite – “I think we should go in the basement” tilt to the question.) To which he replied, “No, we’ll be all right. Let’s just go to sleep.” (It was around 10 pm.) The small city we live in hadn’t seen a “storm of the century” in a long time – at least a century. Certainly not in our lifetime. Plus, when I was growing up, I’d been told that Native Indian lore said that when a piece of land lies between two bodies of water (that would be our section of our city), a tornado can’t touch ground, it jumps over – another factor in letting our decision stand. No hurricanes, no tornados – yeah, just go to bed and sleep through it. After the storm was over, we were told there wasn’t a tornado, that all the winds were straight – based on the damage done – but then we found out that a tornado did touch down on the other side of the smaller lake. Maybe it jumped over? Those Native Indians knew/know the land.

So, we managed to go to sleep through the sounds of torrential rains, loud thunder, and flashes of lightning. When we got up the next morning, there was still no electricity – the city was without power for days; we didn’t even get to see the TV reports about us, which got on national news! Bummer. Plus, no coffee pots or toasters…I bet a few coffee-sustained people had headaches. Although I heard that many people went out to Burger King and got coffee. As they were on the outskirts of town, they had evaded the electricity outage. I think they were the only restaurant in town that did. I hope they had a lot of coffee…

In lieu of the usual ways of getting the news, we decided to have a walkabout and see for ourselves how things had fared. The first sight we got was about a third of the tree in front of our house was laying in our front yard and in the street – where we usually parked the car, so it would have been severely damaged. (We had teenagers come through the week before and smash our windshield, so we decided no more parking on the street – divine providence? Fixing a windshield was a lot better than having to replace the car.) The next sight we got was a large chunk of the tree across the street laying against a neighbor’s house and lawn. We walked down the street to get a closer look, hoping there wasn’t too much damage (her house was one of the houses that got on the news – that we missed) and another neighbor on our side of the street came out and chatted with us. We had a good chuckle over the “Did you go in the basement? No, did you?” topic, which became a theme for us. Apparently, although Michiganders have basements for good reason, many of us don’t take advantage of them. The chatty new gal – staying at her parents’ rental house – had us laughing because her husband did want them to take advantage of the basement, but she wouldn’t go down. Her distaste of spiders was far worse than a really bad storm – even though her husband had driven to the beach to watch the storm come in and almost couldn’t find his way back due to the barrage of rain coming down. The tall, lit-up spire of the local church was the only thing he could gage for his direction – good thing he got home before the lights went out.

A couple days after our brief look at our neighborhood, two of our adult children stopped by with our eldest grandchild who was about eight at the time. We decided to do a proper walkabout, so our son plopped our granddaughter on his shoulders, and we wandered about most of the city and were quite shocked at the damage. The rain had been so violent and the quantity so much that roads were swept away, cars crushed by trees or taken into the sink holes with roads (one of my friends was driving and almost ended up in one of the road collapses), and trees and big branches were toppled and traveled down the river in the road as well as collapsed over onto houses. We paused our walkabout at one such house, amazed that the entire, huge tree covered the wide, three-story house. The tree shielded most of the house from sight, and I said out loud – since it was our theme – “I wonder if the owners went in the basement.” Out of the leaves and branches that rose to almost the top of the house came a voice, saying: “Nope. We watched the tree come down. It was like it was in slow motion.” It was a calm voice that held some humor in it. I love people who can laugh through these things. A closer look showed a face in the upstairs window only just visible. We chatted with her and then moved on to other disturbing scenes. And when the newspapers came out, we were able to see the complete destruction of the outlying areas and roads.

As to our chunk of downed tree that stretched across the lawn almost to the front step, we managed to drag or roll it off the road, but a couple weeks after the storm, we heard that the city was not able to take care of all the devastation – they were waiting for help from FEMA. So, one day I went out to try and tackle it. Nice try. A pair of clippers was not doing much. My husband was at work, so I was stuck. He could hopefully use one of his saws to cut it up – yes, the electricity was back on. In my frustration, I told God, “Ok, God, we help people all the time, and nobody ever helps us. What’s up with that? Can’t you send a little help our way once in a while?” I kept my meager clipping going after my pity-party tirade to God was over, making very little dent in the partial tree, and shortly after a neighbor came over to me – one that is very nice and could be chatty, but who never went out of his yard – and he said to me, “Do you have outside electricity?” I replied with a yes, and he said he’d be back in a minute. He came back with a mini chainsaw that looked a bit like a wee crocodile in action and between his maneuvering his chainsaw and my dragging branches, we got it all down to size and off the sidewalk and our primary yard. I thanked him, then remembered I better thank God for his earthly angel-send. I was especially grateful that the neighbor survived his stint of earthly angelhood since, after we finished, as asked him how he was doing, and he admitted that his doctor had told him he wasn’t supposed to do anything or he’d likely have another, possibly fatal, heart attack. Yikes, and thank you Jesus! He was still breathing when he left. (He admitted that he cut wood for his daughter on a regular basis as he figured there wasn’t much point in living unless you’re living.)

So, yes, this was the storm of the century for us. Although, it was minor compared to others who have gone through hurricanes and tornadoes that destroyed towns, and worse, took people. For as much damage as was done, not one life was lost to that storm. My respect for storms increased, but I still don’t fear them like some people. I guess the trick to not ending up with astraphobia might be that I already respected storms (recognized what the worst scenario might be and would [or thought I would] take the right steps if needed – "what, you didn’t go in the basement?!"), plus I’m an optimist. While I do remember the devastation, I mostly recall the blessing of a neighbor, the conversations with new people, and the humor that we shared despite the trials of having to clean up the massive mess the storm left behind, including the inconvenience of living without electricity for several days. People are amazingly resilient. We rebuild when destruction comes. We should remember that when “storms” come in our lives, and know that whatever is happening, it, too, will pass, and we can rebuild.

Interesting Tidbit:

Okay, remember I asked about the mother of all storms? This is what I found:

"Mother of all ________ (1991), is Gulf War slang, from Saddam Hussein's use in reference to the coming battle; it is an Arabic idiom (as well as an English one), for instance Ayesha, second wife of Muhammad, is known as Mother of Believers; the figure is attested in English in 19c. (Virginia is called mother of commonwealths from 1849).” Online Etymology Dictionary

Voice from the branches house. This tree took a chunk of sidewalk with it.

Our front walk; you can only see part of what covered the front yard.

Neighbor's house and yard.