Alive and Well

 

I am sending this out at the library because we still on august 24 do not have Internet at home.

 

Hello,

 

I do not have internet so I cannot send this, but I wanted to start writing about our situation. We are alive and almost well at this time. I will explain the wellness some time later.

 

For now I want to tell about our journey through the greatest storm I have ever experienced. There are always new things, even after 72 years. This all happened on August 10, 2020.

 

I worked in Ely that day while Leroy stayed home, in part because he did not plan to work and partly because his headache was quite painful. Because of the pain he was mostly just lying around.

 

On the drive to work I heard on the radio that there was a strong storm coming with straight line winds and that people should not be out in that storm. For some reason I did not park in my favorite place under a shade tree because it was recycle day and there are often bins in that spot. I thought about parking in front of my co-worker’s car because there was a nice tree there that would also give nice shade, instead I parked in a more open place.

 

At about noon the sirens started going off, warning of a storm coming. Leroy called to tell me not to come home as the sirens were going off there and on the TV they were telling people to seek shelter. There were only we three workers at the library and we gathered flashlights. We watched out the windows and when it started in seriously, the windowless restroom became our safe place. The power went off very early, but we could see. Grateful for the invention of such alternate lights along with the phones.

 

We could hear the rain and some wind pounding on the roof. When it abated, we checked outside. There was still quite a lot of wind and some rain. The power did not come back on. Each of us found some small jobs that we could do without electricity. When we could see better, it was obvious that I chose a good parking place because both of the other two had trees or branches. My car could have been seriously damaged. My co-worker’s car just missed having a tree on it. Closer to two o’clock it was much quieter and I decided to go home. I wanted to check up on Leroy and to see what had happened at home.

 

I messaged Leroy that I was on my way home. There were a number of cars on the road. In one or two places there had been some branches cut out of the way so cars could travel. When I got to the four lane highway that I usually take, I could see that it was jammed with cars and emergency flashing lights. I then decided to take a street even though I worried about trees and debris on the road. About a mile into it traffic seemed to be at a crawl so I turned off on a side street only to see that a truck was across the road. I turned around and some kind driver let me into the queue. We crept along and finally came to a place where only one car could pass. Luckily, people were sharing the road by basically taking turns. After that I was seeing more and more trees down and destruction everywhere. Neighbors were out using chain saws and directing traffic. As I approached the electric power plant, I saw a utility pole snapped off at the bottom and hanging from the wires. These are big poles with three bars across. I counted eight of them in this condition. I knew then that all would not have power any time soon.

 

I drove over some larger branches than I liked, but others were doing it ahead of me. Then as I was going down a hill one of the people directing traffic, yelled, “Don’t go down there. Power lines are down.”

 

I turned around. I know this neighborhood only a little. Street signs were blown over so it was hard to know. Generally I have a good sense of direction so I tried to follow my “gut.” Often I would end up in a place that was impassible with a tree across the road. Sometimes I would follow someone else because they looked confident of where they were going. At one point I pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store thinking I might just go in there, but I realized it was all dark because of no power. The car had half a tank of gas and all of a sudden that did not see adequate. Luckily this car is not a gas hog. Too often I made little progress and sat in lines waiting to go to some unrecognizable place.

 

Paula