Ten Years Ago Tonight

Rochester Night #2
July 2006 Rochester, NY
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Ten years ago today we spent a good deal of time watching the news, waiting for the next weather report. And the next weather report. And the next...

Hurricane Fran was headed towards the east coast and landfall was anticipated somewhere in North Carolina. Depending where it made landfall, it could either hug the eastern seaboard and we in Raleighwood would only get a serious drenching or it could come straight into our front yards.

We were living in an old farmhouse at the time. Built back around the turn of the century where the original tongue-and-groove wall slats could still be seen in places and when the word “insulation” was only a twinkle in some manufacturer’s eye, the house was little more than a wooden frame with a tin roof. The back half of the house, with it’s kitchen and two additional rooms, had been built in the 1960s, once the sharecroppers had long since stopped living there and the owner felt sorry for the woman who had taken up residence there.

On two sides of the house there were seven huge pecan trees, each well over 100 years old. An older farmer who grew soybeans, tobacco and sweet potatoes on the land told me he remembered playing around those trees when he was a child.

In the early Fall I could sit just about anywhere in the front or side yard and within my arm span I could find enough ripe pecans to eat my fill. To this day I still have a problem not only buying pecans, but accepting the dull, lifeless taste of “commercial” pecans.

As a true testament to the differences in our personalities, ten years ago tonight when we went to bed I promptly fell asleep – and stayed deeply asleep until Bonn woke me up, angry that I wasn’t awake and panicking like she was.

Fran had chosen the Cape Fear region of the state to come ashore with sustained winds at 115 mph. She then set continued on a path that took her straight hlhe torrents of rain coming down, both outside and on the tin roof. Rain on the tin roof always made something of a pinging sound, but that night it was one steady, loud barrage of sound.

Bonn’s main concern was that the pecan tree outside our bedroom window would come down on the house and kill both of us. She wanted both of us out of the room and in a “safe place” in the house. With no basement and no solely interior room to the house, Bonn gathered The Boy and a mattress and tried to set up a shelter for them in the door frame leading into the living room.

Rain and wind slashed at the roof and the windows. Outside we could hear massive tree limbs cracking and falling all around the house. Bonnie worked on fighting down panic while I worked on reassuring her that we were going to be alright.

A lightening bolt took out half the biggest tree in the front yard, ripping it away from the huge, thick trunk and bringing it partially down to the ground. That, however, was enough to pull down the tentative power line we had running from across the street to the house.

In a mad act of kindness our next door neighbor, a man who would, months later, pack up his wife and their child in the middle of the night and go tearing down the road, leaving a literal trail of clothes and children’s toys down the dirt road behind them all in an effort to avoid an impending court date, ran across the yard separating our homes and banged on our door.

“Are you okay?” he shouted over the storm.

“Yes,” I shouted back. “We have flashlights and a radio. We’re okay!”

We called the power company to report the downed power line. Miraculously, someone actually came out an hour or two later. I stepped outside and felt like someone had thrown a bucket of water at me – in seconds I was drenched from head to foot and I was standing well inside our covered porch.

He used his high power flashlight to show me where the wire lay across the yard.

“It’s live,” he yelled. “We can’t do anything about it tonight. Just be careful and don’t go near it!”

I thought about our neighbor who could have easily died trying to make sure we were okay. It convinced me that shared emergencies can bring out the selfless best in people.

A short while later the tin roof, which had been banging at the front right corner of the house, finally gave way. In a great gust of wind I heard an entire section of the roof rip away from the roof frame. The rain became louder as it starting pouring into the house, landing on the drywall that made up the ceiling to the living room.

The ceiling started to sag above a couch. By flashlight we moved as much of the furniture out of the living room as possible and I started setting down pans to collect the water that was dripping, then pouring through the ceiling. Water started coming out of the ceiling fan in the center of the room. Water was dripping in through the solid wood window frames.

As pans filled up, I opened a window and threw the water out, hoping I was getting more water out of the house than was coming in.

I sent Bonn and The Boy to a back room where they finally fell asleep. I spent the long night emptying out pans and bowls, figuring I’d get dry again sometime after daybreak.

The AM radio all news station in town was giving updates as often as possible and filled in the time in between with phone calls from people overcome with gratitude for the people around them who had risked their own lives to help them out. It made the hours go by a bit easier.

By daybreak, when there was finally enough light to see out the front door, we walked out to a disaster. The front yard, once a wide splash of green grass shaded by ancient pecan trees was nothing but jagged piles of pecan branches and tree trunks. Of the seven trees that had stood, providing us with shade and security, only one and a half survived the night. The half of the tree in the far corner was still there and, remarkably, the tree that hung over our bedroom remained all but untouched.

Our other neighbor tried to go to work that morning. He managed to get less than a tenth of a mile down the road when he came upon trees all across the road that weren’t going to be moved anytime soon. Trying the opposite direction he found the same thing a similar distance away. Instead, he brought up a big container of powered orange Gaterade and helped me clear out as much of the yard as we could manage before we dropped from exhaustion.

Power was out for... days. After ten years I don’t remember how long we were without power – which also meant being without water – but it was long enough. We were actually fairly lucky in that we got power back within only a few days. Other parts of the city, parts that were “better off” than we were, were without power for well over a week.

I was teaching in those days and school was canceled for the better part of two weeks. When we finally returned the kids clearly needed to share their experiences. We all did a lot to help them work through their fears and realize they hadn’t been alone in that fear. We’d all shared in it.

One teacher asked me to read a book to her class about a boy and his sister who lived through a tornado in their midwest town. As I read that book, the class seemed to hang on every word. Sure it was a different city and different circumstances, but part of it was still their story.

We never got confirmation that what had run through our front yard was a spun-off tornado, but I know that was the case. There was a twist to too many of the trees in our yard and the surrounding area. And, about a mile or two away in a straight line from our house was another house that had had their trees uprooted. They, too, were twisted in the same way.

Bonn showed me pictures of the old farmhouse again tonight and reminded me that this was the ten year anniversary of Fran. Looking at the house, it’s really remarkable that the winds didn’t just take the house away. (Think “The Wizard of Oz” only without the happy “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” landing)

I count is as one of the miracles of our life.

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