Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

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 pl...

David Heiller   Noah and I each grabbed an umbrella and headed outside for an exciting Saturday night at the Heiller house. A thunderstorm was heading our way, and we wanted to be a part of it. Noah and David News banners on the television screen had set the stage. Warning beeps sounded like the distress signal of a sinking submarine. Then some weather man with a real voice, a voice like yours or mine, spoke over the now-silent tennis match. “At 7:47 p.m., a line of thunderstorms was spotted on Doppler radar moving north northeast at approximately 18 miles an hour. This storm contains hail the size of Volkswagons. In its path is the city of Finlayson and the Heiller residence.” That’s what my imagination said at least. There’s something about a thunderstorm that is both frightening and fascinating. You hope you don’t get zapped. You hope the wind doesn ’ t turn into a tornado, or that six inches of rain doesn’t fall in two hours. You hope the hail doesn’t grow t...