Stormy June

 One month ago, Wednesday, June 15, 2022, a severe storm ripped through our neighborhood.  Weather warnings had been ongoing all day long and when I saw that a prominent storm chasing YouTuber named Reed Timmer was tornado hunting in Wisconsin, it wasn't a good sign.  We had been weeding all day in the high heat and humidity and when the sky turned dark at around 5:30 pm we decided to retreat to the house. 

I had just poured a glass of water when Carl said, "Do you hear it?"

Yes, I did.  The sound of a freight train approaching and coming in fast.

I took my beverage and headed downstairs to the basement.  Seated on a chair in the midst of the clutter we have still to deal with since the remodel, I sighed with a rather defeatist attitude.  Of course it is the safest course of action to go to the basement during a storm, but even beyond safety reasons, I had no desire to watch our house be destroyed in less than a minute. 

Carl opted to stay seated in our bay window overlooking the garden, which of course, is not a safe option, but almost identical to the way things went in the early 1980's when the last tornado tore up our neighborhood and my father's barn with it. 

At that time, Carl had remained upstairs taking photos of the most alarming lightning we'd ever seen in our 23 years of life while I was cowering in the basement with our German Shepherd dog, Sparky.  As the storm grew increasingly worse and the power went out, I remember yelling for Carl until he finally relented and came downstairs to join us.  As the storm started to abate, I climbed up on a chair to look out the west basement window and at the next lightning flash, I said, "Dad's barn is gone."  

 We gingerly climbed up the basement stairs to see if we still had a roof, and miraculously, our house and my parents were entirely intact, but the path of destruction through the neighborhood and beyond was terrible.  Luckily, we lost no cattle and no one was hurt, but it was a mess back then.

Below is a before and after of our barn in 1980.

 

 

I'm also including a link to my post of that storm: Our Barn

Fast forward 40 years and the storm path was nearly identically repeated, only this time just a quarter-mile to our west.  I went out on the front porch to see how the house had fared and a car turned into our driveway.  

A man rolled down his window and yelled, "Are you okay?!" 

I gave him the thumb's up and he waved and headed back west.  He'd had to turn around because a huge oak tree had come down in the woods and landed entirely across the road. 

Joel called me and said that the big cottonwood tree was down on the northwest corner of the farm.  The tree was a landmark for us as it was huge for as long as I could remember. 

The pictures below are from a few years ago:

 After the 1981 storm, the cottonwood had taken a beating, too, and it bore the scars of having been struck by lightning many times. 

Now, it is no more.

While I was still on the phone with Joel that night, he said, "Oh, no! Dale's barn is down, too!"

 Dale is the young farmer who has been renting our land for over a decade.  What a mess he has to deal with, and how eerily similar to the storm 41 years ago and our barn's destruction.

The neighbors have been helping each other with what they can, luckily no one was hurt.  Our area was hit very hard by this storm, trees were down, roof damage, barns and sheds destroyed and at least  one home was damaged beyond repair.

We drove our excavator over to the barn site at 1AM to avoid highway traffic.  Joel assisted with removing the biggest parts of the wreckage.

 Clean up is still ongoing a month later.

We were without power from Wednesday, June 15 until Sunday, June 19, at 7PM.  This is the longest stretch of power outage I can remember in sixty-four years.  The damage was so extensive; we had crews from Iowa and a few other states here working on the downed power lines all over the county.

Once again, we were lucky that our house was spared.  A big spruce and part of a cedar went down near the garden, but didn't wreck anything else.  We lost about fifteen trees in the Back Eight that we're taking our time dealing with and at Carl's parent's property, there's another dozen that are out by the roots, but no damage to buildings.  

The power outage was a bit of a dilemma, though we were lucky to own a generator and that we'd just had it tuned up by a friend of Joel's a month earlier.  We could keep the freezers and sump pump going by running the generator for a few hours.  Also, luckily for all of us, the temperatures remained cool for the five days after the storm, not the 90's we'd had before.  Living in the country, when the power goes out, there's no water either, so bathing is out of the question.  Our nearby towns were without power, too, so if we needed groceries and gasoline for the generators we had to drive to Green Bay. 

Our friend Ann came on Saturday with hot water in insulated jugs so we could wash our hands and do some dishes.  What a blessing that was!  In between times, Carl and I kept weeding the garden during the day here and there and life seemed almost normal again, until night, that is.

I had boiled a bunch of eggs the day before the storm, so for those five days we ate eggs, cold cuts, cereal and cabbage.  I have sleep apnea and for the first time in over a decade, I had no CPAP which made sleeping a struggle, but hey, I survived.  We didn't get much sleep anyway because the battery powered sump pump alarm would go off every hour and with a generator running wide open next to the bedroom window, well, sleep was elusive.

We were blessed to have come through another storm with no injuries. 

I will say candlelight suppers are okay, but the romance wears off pretty quickly.  

Nothing beats a hot shower.