A hail of a storm ~ August 17, 2000

Daivd Heiller

Thunder rumbled non-stop high above our home on Monday evening, August 14. The tense and humid day was turning ugly.

Cindy had left for Cloquet to pick up Mollie from a church retreat. I stayed home to work on the computer for the newspaper. Noah was with me. I like to be home when bad weather visits. I was worried about Cindy in the car.

Enjoying our yard in the spring,
before the storm beat everything up.

It seemed like hours. It was probably about 10 minutes. Then when the hail had finished, the rain came down in sheets.

After it stopped, I walked through the yard. All the trees were standing. That was a relief. But their branches were shredded and gaunt. Everything—the ground, the deck, the hammock, the trampoline—was covered with leaves and branches that had been torn off by the hail.

A window on the north side of the house was broken. The rain gauge was broken. The garden was devastated: corn flattened, squash torn up, tomatoes punctured. The plastic on the greenhouse looked like it had been attacked by someone with a knife. The hood of the truck had dents.

Noah and I got in the truck and drove through the neighborhood. Piles of hail lay on the ground like glacial deposits, left by streams of water. The road was carpeted with leaves wherever there were trees nearby.

Corn stalks stood like toothpicks. Seeing that changed my perspective a bit. Losing a vegetable garden is pretty puny compared to losing part of your income.

Cindy and Mollie got home at about 9:30. I was worried that Cindy might have driven into the hail, but she must have been just ahead of it, because she didn’t get hit. She and Mollie were fine. That was a big relief.

The power came back on at 10:40 p.m., just as I was drifting off to sleep and Cindy was reading the newspaper by flashlight.

The roof took the worst of it, and had to be replaced.

It was a relief to have the electricity back. I never did get my newspaper work done. No power means no computer; no computer means no newspaper.

We had to watch how much water we used since the pump wasn’t working. We had to be careful how often we opened the refrigerator and freezer. We didn’t want any food to spoil. We couldn’t cook supper.

Old-timers might scoff at that, as they recall the days before electrification. But they were used to it, with wood-burning stoves and kerosene lamps. We don’t have that anymore. A loss of power for six hours is a little disconcerting.

As reports of the storm came into the office on Tuesday morning, I realized again how fortunate we were. A lot of people said that their car windows had been cracked and car bodies dented. Trees fell on houses. Siding on houses was punctured. Roofs were damaged. Crops like corn were hurt.

But Earl Johnsen summed up another part of my thoughts. We are lucky, he said when he stopped in to get a photocopy made on Tuesday. Forest fires are destroying homes out west. Floods are wrecking homes. Tornadoes have wiped out cities like Granite Falls. People in settings like that would gladly change places with us.

We can handle our hail storms. They aren’t fun. But it could have been much worse.