The other day I had a chance to catch up with an old friend. She had asked to come by and I suggested we meet at the house instead of the office; the days had been very hot but the weather was cooling down; the back yard seemed a better place to talk after years of not being in touch. We sat and talked about all that happens in life and work.
As we sat it clouded up some – a welcome relief – and then it started to sprinkle. We came in when the sprinkle turned to rain. I had a conference call at three, which I did from the house. A little before four o’clock I turned on the lights in the kitchen. The sky was getting pretty dark. I heard lightning, so as I wrapped up the call I ran around the house unplugging computers, routers, radios.
The kids got home from camp and ran into the house as the rain really started to fall. Excited about the storm, they dashed upstairs to get a good view of the show. And then it started to hail.
The hail sounded like someone throwing marbles at the windows. Within a minute we had to shout to be heard over the dime-sized ice-stones slapping the house.
Not long after the hail began, the sky turned as dark as daylight can handle and the wind picked up. We saw some lighting strike the ground near the house. The power went out and the event went from ‘interesting storm, exciting for the kids’ to ‘seems dangerous.’ Of course we all therefore headed out to the front porch.
The hail was coming down now in sheets; later I saw what damage hail does to crops and gardens. The wind had been driving north to south, and then it began to swirl. I heard a tree come down on the other side of the barn, to the north, and then I saw the beautiful maple in front of our house split.
The trunk of this tree had three branches – like an upside down three-legged stool. About fifteen years ago we wired the three legs of the stool together to keep the tree from coming apart. It was a small tree then. Just this spring we’d noticed the maple had become a stout and seasoned veteran. The caliper of the tree is over a foot. Each of the main branches, or legs of the stool, is six inches or more.
And with the wind whirling and the hail crashing and the lightening and thunder rocking the ground, I stood and watched a third of that tree snap and peel away and twist and fall to earth. It happened so slowly and took only a second. I heard more trees cracking and crashing now. Later I saw they were big cherry trees; they broke about eight feet off the ground and the tops fell across our road, blocking it completely. Just to the south of the house a massive swamp maple came down too, hanging on the power line.
The storm passed in a few minutes. The hail stopped falling and now it was just rain. We ran outside to check the barn. Things in the big old building had been thrown around even inside, but the structure itself was fine. The hens were clucking but okay. We walked around the edge of the fields and the yard to see the extent of the damage. Four trees were down around the house and a number had fallen across the road. The storm pummeled the garden. The northwest side of the house was plastered with shredded leaves; it looked like stucco made of salad.
We called the power company to let them know a tree was across their line. We called the town garage to report the road was blocked. Within a half an hour the electric company had a guy there to free the wires. Within an hour a loader was pushing the felled lumber off the road and into the woods in front of our house.
We worked hard to clear the damage. I heard a TV news-team was at a house on Route 100 getting footage of the damage. I saw the day after the storm a TV crew filming at the veterinarian’s house, where the lawn was littered with branches and it seems a tree hit the house.
I heard too that a town highway crew, stuck in a line of cars during the storm, jam
med along the road because of felled trees, saw a funnel cloud form and the sky turn green. Friends told us they watched the storm from their house above the valley and they also saw a funnel cloud form out of the storm and touch down.
I did not see anything but hail. I’d say I saw the wind but that’s a small stretch. I did see the wind rip apart a stout maple and snap cherry trees. The worst I can say of the storm is it destroyed my eggplant crop so it was not so bad.
I am sure by the end of the summer the ‘dime sized hail’ will be ‘hail the size of small grapefruit’ and we will all be talking about cows we saw flying through the air, stuck in a twister. For now I’m satisfied to just say we dodged a bullet and the kids won’t miss the eggplant.
David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio Kudos to editor Jesse Roman at the Stowe Reporter for the headline.
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