And There I Was

And there I was, still in the U.P., still building our dream house when the black and green clouds came...

And There I Was

               

Around noon when I went out to the road to get the mail, I noticed thickening cumulus clouds and a line of towering cumulus to the west. My meteorological instructor had nicknamed these cloud formations “dead poodles” because of their tall, fluffy profiles like poodle legs sticking up into the sky, and from a meteorological standpoint not a good thing so early in the day. I didn’t give the clouds a second thought as Karen and I continued cleaning up after our visitors who had departed that morning. Bonnie the Blue Dog came out of hiding to relax because she had spent most of the time during the visit out of sight inside her indoor dog house. 

We were four years into building our house in Marquette County of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had done everything ourselves from digging the basement, pouring concrete, laying blocks, raising walls, pulling cable, and plumbing pipes. In fact, Karen and I did everything top to bottom except drill the well and install the furnace. The house, which we affectionately called the “Yooper Schooner,” was finally far enough along to have visitors though it was far from being done. The nickname was derived from appearing somewhat like a huge ship in the woods with a pointed prow front, gray roof, wood burning chimney on top, and inside, 16 foot Great Room ceilings. We loved how it was looking though the visitors didn’t seem impressed, but who did we have to please but ourselves? We had no worries on that particularly fateful day.

At about two in the afternoon, the light winds switched to the southeast and picked up a little, a harbinger of a frontal passage. My nose bothered me which meant either a thunderstorm or a snowstorm on its way. It was eighty-eight degrees and sticky, sweaty, shirt-sticking humid, so there would be no snow today in the U.P. even though we remained in the rough-sledding period of the northland. We sweated; the concrete floor sweated. The winds gradually rose a little to about fifteen miles an hour. At three-thirty, we noticed black-based cumulus billowing on the horizon. I went out to scope them out, because I had nothing construction-wise in progress. The clouds appeared to me as the standard foul weather towering cumulus, not yet reaching nimbus stage, thunderstorm height. Still nothing to worry about on a normal Yooper summer day. At four-fifteen, a blast of south wind shook the trees around house, strong enough for us to hear inside at least, maybe twenty-five miles an hour, but then they died off again.

At four-forty five, we heard the first rumble of thunder. From inside the house, you could never see the weather situation too well through the leafed out trees, but through the flickering leafy gaps, the western sky down toward the horizon appeared dark gray. Looking straight up, through our hole in the woods, I could see huge sprouting, bright white cumulonimbus tops. An in-cloud lightning bolt blasted white-yellow against the black clouds. Karen appeared at the patio door.

“Going to be a bad one?” She asked.

I shrugged. I didn’t like the looks of what I saw, but without checking meteorological tools like computer models and a Doppler radar my guess was just that, a guess. Karen, the ever-efficient girl she is, went in and started filling everything that held water: plastic ice cream containers, Bonnie’s water dishes, and Alaskan Highway-weary water containers. She gathered up candles and our three railroad lanterns. She did this out of habit because when thunderstorms boom in the U.P., the lights go out.

When I noticed what she had done, I said, “It’s not going to be that bad.” These were my most infamous last words coming at five oh five. I took Bonnie out to the patio as I counted seconds between flash and bangs: twelve seconds. Bonnie foregoed stink-weeding in the brush and tinkled right there on the patio’s gravel. She begged to go inside as I counted and studied the slivers of gnarly sky through the gaps in waving trees. Eight seconds. The storm was a fast mover of a dangerous type. Bonnie Blue gladly snuck inside. A blast of fresh cool air blew into my face from the ravine, winds about thirty miles an hour. These winds were coming from high in the atmosphere. Strong non-thunderstorm winds like that aren’t good when coupled with frequent lightning producing thunderstorms. As a few rain drops pitter-pattered on my hat, a thought about low-level jets and the nasty things associated with them came to mind, but hey, this was the U.P!

Karen yelled, “Come in here and get out of the weather, Neal!”

Huge, cold raindrops, probably ice cubes split seconds and thousands of feet ago, began falling at a steep angle. They hurt and chilled. The black blanket rolled overhead and the bright nimbus tops disappeared. Flash, five seconds, boom. I decided to follow Karen’s advice and went inside. I slid the door shut. Flash, craaack! At the same time, within a mile. 

“Whoa baby!” I always said that with close lightning strikes.

Five-ten and the first wind gusts out of southwest hit us. The trees waved around and shook three or four times in quick succession. Winds were maybe forty miles per hour.

                “Nothing to worry about,” I told Karen though she read my face a little too long.

                “Good thing my brother and family left this morning,” she said ascetically.

                 Simultaneous lightning and thunder flashed in the windows of the Yooper Schooner, and the thunder rattled the dishes in the laundry tub. (We didn’t have a kitchen sink yet, at this point.) I watched all around as the trees surrounding the house whipped and swayed. Loose leaves flopped against the patio door and were whipped away.

The sky turned a sick green under the black cloud bases, a really bad omen. The rain pelted the house, sounding like pellets from a thousand b-b guns on the steel roof and Tyvek plastic siding. The raindrops literally became bullets when the rain became pea-sized hail, then quickly dime-sized, and then swiftly nickel-sized hail banging onto the windows. After a minute, the hail subsided becoming slush. The winds died off, down to about ten miles an hour. The thunder and lightning had moved off to the east, now ten seconds apart. I took a deep breath, no worries, it was over.

                My heart calmed a bit. I glanced to the west, and a chill when up my back. The sky looked unbelievably blacker than ever, as they say biblically, “black as sackcloth.” Another rash of thunder and lightning approached; there were too many flashes and too many bangs to match and count, too many to distinguish apart, and it began a continuous deafening banging like kettledrums during an orchestral epic. The sky boiled with a stew of swirling black, gray, and green clouds.

Beware the black and green clouds.

I thought I saw maybe a gust front hit rolling in from the west, but I wasn’t about to get a better look by going out to the road. As the trees swayed, I could see the roiling clouds of an outflow boundary. As the trees bent and swayed a few times, a roar, unlike I had ever heard before came from the west. A tornado in the U.P.? Highly unlikely. Karen and I looked at each other; I knew I had a frightened expression. Karen looked surprisingly brave. Now on her feet, Bonnie’s bat-like ears rotated like miniature radars while sensing our concern, scanning out those vulnerable huge, energy efficient windows at all the tree movement swaying, dancing back and forth in wild jigs.

                The roar grew louder and nearer in seconds. The digital light in the stove abruptly went out, the only visual indicator of electricity. The three of us moved into the kitchen and bathroom-separating hallway, a strong area in the new house’s structure providing protection from potential breaking glass. The wind gusts hit hard, maybe fifty miles an hour, as great wads of leafy branches hit the windows and rattled before flying away. You could no longer hear the thunder over the wind. Lightning flashed all around and huge rain drops with hail smashed into the windows. Standing in the hallway, we had a good view of the trees out front whipping back and forth, and yet, the winds increased.

                Out front, a hard maple about six inches thick, snapped off at about ten feet above the ground. The smaller trees, five inches and smaller were whipping back and forth with their upper branches crashing into one and another and intermittently touching the ground. I heard a crack and peeked around the edge of the house. A soft maple about six inches thick broke off and fell across the driveway. Then, the wind’s speed and roar increased.

And just as suddenly, the gustiness dropped with another distant heavy railroad locomotive roar approaching. The winds picked up speed, quickly higher, and increasing more yet, incessantly pushing hard on the trees like huge, strong hands pushing and pulling them back and forth until forcing them down flat, and keeping them down to the ground. I ventured glances out the front, down the hallway and out the back windows. Trees were snapping off all around outside, and now bigger trees were going over and down, thrusting up huge clumpy mounds spitting dirt and exposing gnarly roots. The winds had to be well over sixty now, I guessed, as larger two, three foot long branches were hitting the house and flying from view. Grim reality sunk in as I pointed to the back of the house.

                We backed down the hallway and sat on the floor in the open unfinished closet as a refuge. Bonnie lay at our feet alert, looking all around as trees cracked and snapped around outside. This was the strongest part of the house near the concrete wall that provided a protection that even if the house went down we would have forty-six inches of concrete to tuck under. There were log beams above and hallway walls on three sides of us. In this position, we could only catch glimpses out the backdoor’s window and out the kitchen windows. This closet could be the last part of the house standing if the winds increased anymore and the house went down. And yet, the winds increased still.

                Unbelievably, the winds hit still harder, maybe eighty-plus and the eight-inch hard maple by the backdoor cracked loud like a cannon and went down toward where the Dakota was parked. We only saw the upper trunk and branches fall out of sight. I expected to hear a metallic crunch from the truck, but I didn’t hear anything except the wind’s roar. Just hours ago, for a week, our visitors had parked in that same exact spot. Those few seconds of hard, straight-line winds pounded around us, then, bam! boom, boom! Shadows and trees changed outside. A picture fell off the west wall, the glass shattering across the floor. I saw the shadows of two huge maples, fifteen inches or more in diameter had crashed into the house. This double tree had stood on the edge of the patio where the bank dropped into the ravine, and now it lay against the roof.

                I envisioned a smashed truck, crushed roof, and broken roof trusses. As quick as the blasting winds started, they subsided. The bam, bump, bump continued on the roof where the huge trees lay on it. I looked out front and most of the trees were still bent over in curving bows despite the lighter winds. Some of those trees remained that way, bent permanently. We could now hear the thunder rumble away in the distance. The winds remained gusty but only about twenty, twenty-five now, and any leaves or small branches that were loose were long gone to the next eastern county of Au Train. I walked out into the kitchen, surveying the huge tree leaning on the house. In the lighter gusty winds, the tree was moving still bumping on the roof. I didn’t realize it at the time but that was a good sign.

                In about fifteen minutes, the winds dropped off more, and we ventured outside. Bonnie tinkled again; I think, like her human masters, she was stressed. I used the old outhouse myself. The tree by the backdoor lay across the top of the truck, but I didn’t look too closely. A couple trees lay across the driveway. A huge maple had peeled out of the ground and laid alongside Karen’s car, parallel, not two feet away from it. Half of the maple’s root system had risen out of the ground with the root ends touching the front bumper and fender, a narrow escape for the little car. I emboldened myself and examined the Dakota. Pulling the branches aside, I found the tree had creased the roof and door edge, but the windshield had survived. On the other side of the truck, the thickest branches were compressed on Karen’s over-engineered garden fence, cushioning the tree’s impact on the truck.

                I did not know if I could face the situation of the big trees on the roof. When I went around and looked up, it appeared bad with those huge brushy branches extending up over the roof’s peak. I could not see the damage because of the foliage, but just considering the size, well, I could not face it right at that moment. On checking down the street both ways, I saw many trees across it along with a dead power cable draped across the debris and brush. I surmised that The Board of Light and Power crews would not be able to get through to fix the power that day. Another electric line was down by the farmer’s place. I grabbed and gassed my Stihl chainsaw and fired off the clunky tractor. I bounced across the three trees in the driveway to get to the street and commenced to cutting and pushing logs off the street. The farmer came out to see what was going on and not to be bested, ran to get his saw. We didn’t say a word until I tried to be sociable.

                “Have any damage?”  I asked.

                “No, not a thing.” He said, then a silence. “I saw trees fell on your house and truck.” How’d he see that? “That’s what you get for building a house with trees all around.” Mr. Nosey added.

                I found out later from his son that he had a couple barn doors blown off and destroyed, with some other damages�"dork! I pulled off about a dozen trees in both directions before the sun went down. Tomorrow was another day to access the house’s internal damage. Karen had lanterns and candles going all around. Using a match, she fired off the stove because the burners had electric ignitions. After eating a simple bowl of chicken noodle soup, the proverbial comfort food, we went to bed early, but I didn’t sleep, imagining the damage to the roof and wall structure. Like usual, I finally got to sleep after six AM.

 

***

We still didn’t have power that morning, so we listened to the news on the battery radio. We were astonished at no mention whatsoever of the storm! Getting to the easy storm clean up things first, I got the trees out of the driveway. Then, lifting the tree off the truck with the tractor bucket and a chain, I carefully trimmed the tree branches away from the truck until I could back it out from underneath. I chunked the tree into manageable pieces and threw them to the side of the driveway.

                The biggest job came in the afternoon which was refreshingly cool, sunny and bright. The roof had dried, so I threw a rope over and tied myself in. Karen hung on to the other end after wrapping the rope around the tall stump that used to be the maple by the backdoor. I tied a rope to the chainsaw, climbed up, and hand over hand pulled the saw up. I cut away the small branches, throwing them off the roof on both sides until I got to the peak.

                I eventually uncovered the main trunks. One was elevated about a foot off the roof, the other up about two inches, probably coming up with the relieved weight of the branches. I examined the damage, now completely revealed. The trees had hit right between the trusses and bent the steel and sheathing down about four inches. Lucky again, the trees’ fall was limited because they grew slightly down the slope and their fallen angle matched the pitch of the house.  I looked closer and saw the tree had originally hit straight on a truss and slid aside. I would still have to look inside, crawling within the trusses with that itchy insulation, but imagining the worse I had no idea how to fix the trusses if damaged. I envisioned roof removal, truss replacements or special repairs. As I pressed on, the tree’s pieces I cut up there on the roof got shorter in length as the diameter increased until I got to firewood length of about eighteen inches. When I got right on the roof’s edge, I wondered how I could cut it and not send the piece through a window on a bounce. With Karen’s help because she didn’t have to hold the rope when I was on the ladder, we roped the lengths, cut them, and hinged them away from the house piece by piece for the rest of the day.

The next day, we were still without power. A neighbor had a generator for health concerns and said the Board of Light and Power was still five miles away with four crews working twenty-four hours repairing the electrical cable damage. He said there were quite a few power poles snapped off. I wasn’t surprised but chose not to rubber-neck. We put our frozen things in our camp cooler as the refrigerator defrosted, borrowed water from the neighbor, and used the outhouses just like the olden days, two years previous. There was no word of the storm or power outage on the news.

                I steeled myself to go up inside the trusses. I crawled across with those razor-sharp truss plates indenting my knees and palms, and crawled down to the eaves with one hand and one knee on each truss so I wouldn’t fall through the ceiling. Surprisingly, and much to my relief, found nothing other than the broken sheathing between the trusses. I found no structural damage, no cracks, and no nails dislodged. The truss and wall’s double-plate looked exactly the same as on that October day when we had installed the trusses. I slept better in a house without electrical power, and we were without power for thirteen days. The local media never mentioned us!

                Days after the storm, I found some massive trees down on our property, especially on our first downhill trail where a jumble of twenty to twenty-four inch aspens lay across the trail. I couldn’t clear the trails for months. The neighbor and I took a four-wheeler ride out on trails to the west and found that we sure didn’t get the worse tree damage, and found we were not the worse domicile damage. Out there in the west, in the deep woods, was the epicenter: huge ancient oaks, maples, and everything else was knocked down flat like mowed massive grass. They all had fallen nearly in the same direction, proving the big winds came from a microburst and not a tornado as most locals insisted. Several people told us they had windows broken and significant roof damage. When the power finally came back on, we restocked the fridge and got back to normal, what we considered normal…

                We returned to empirically building our Yooper Schooner.

Author's Note

An excerpt from my memoir "The Empirical House" which tells the story of building our house in the Upper Peninsula.