Hooplah.Org A Story of Graceful Stumbles

Isabell’s aftermath: a picture’s worth…

There's a big story behind this, but ATM, I'm not in the mood to write it. So... I will let some pictures do the story telling for me. Check back tomorrow (or the day after?), I'll probably write more then.

This is what a tree in my front yard did to my mother's saturn.

Added Later:

I don't feel like going over the whole thing, so I'll give a basic rundown. All of Thursday I had my window open, since the storm coming through had made the temperature drop. I was on the computer for most of the day. Everytime I heard a strong wind gust, I would lean back in my char and watch the tips of the trees. Around 6PM, a wind gust started to come through and the power blinked. I looked up at the trees, and they didn't look anymore stressed than normal... but the wind sound was getting louder. It did not sound like a train like they say... but more like a wall of wind, if that makes any sense. The power blinked a few more times, and I got up and looked down the hallway at my mother. She made eye contact with me as I started to walk forward, and told me to get in the hallway. My stupid father was still at the computer, looking out the window, as me and my mom tried to coax him into the hallway as well. He claimed later that he actually saw the trees open up just before he got up and joined us. I stayed in the hallway, while my parents peaked form the hallway out the front door. A few moments passed and there as a large "POW" sound. My parents were still silent, until one of them said "a tree just fell and hit both of the cars". I couldn't believe it, and even as I peaked around the corner and saw the tree that was laying across our yard to the front of our garage, I was still in awe. We couldn't see the damage it had done to the car... all what we could see was the little bit that the corner of the living room window showed, and that only exposed the tree obviously laying on the car, with pieces of plastic sticking up from it in odd angles.

Before the storm, my mother had parked the car in front of the house. But, my father fussed and fussed about picking the truck up from automedic, my mother finally gave in and went. When she got home, she wasn't thinking and parked the car in front of the garage like usual. If my father hadn't of been a brat about getting the truck, none of this would have happened. If my mother had remembered to park the car in front of the house, the truck would have been the one that got totaled, and we wouldn't be given enough money to replace that.

Just things that make you go hmmm...

Shortly after the power went out, around 7PM. We made some timid trips out into the yard to look at the damage, but couldn't stay out long, without fear of another tree going down. The whole night was terrifying... I couldn't sleep in my room since my neighbors had made me nervous about a tree outside of my room. Everytime a wind gust would come, I would sit up in bed. After I got bored of reading Garfield comics and playing gameboy by flashlight, I layed down on my floor (where I thought I'd be out of harm's way) and tried to sleep. Listening to the radio on a headset wasn't all that comforting, since none of them were giving very good news as to when the storm would pass.

The next morning we saw that another tree in our back yard had gone down, and another tree had almost fallen in our front yard but it was being supported by some other trees in it's path. Oddly enough, all the trees that fell were ones no one would have ever suspected. They were the biggest trees on our property. My mother felt that because we had such a wet spring that the trees roots had moved toward the surface since they didn't have to go too deep for water.

At 7AM we walked around some to see the neighboring damage. It seemed that there was a trail of down trees, all pointing the same direction, on our side of the street. I swear that a small tornado touched down and just plowed through a 10-20 block span. That evening we took a drive around the lake, and it seemed that similar things happened all over. From what I could see, none of my friend's houses were hurt/damaged, which was a good sign.

All though the day, people would drive by and almost come to a complete stop to look at the damage to our car. Some took pictures from their cars, while some actually had the nerve to park, get out, and walk up to our poor Saturn to take their pictures. A couple people claimed to be for the news, or to take some extra insurance pictures for us, but most of the time we never saw any results from that. On Friday, we went to get our insurance photos developed for insurance purposes (since that's the only type CVS was developing that day, due to the storm) and there actually was a little twirp behind me who I had seen earlier riding around in a car taking pictures. He was fussing that he didn't get all of his "insurance" photos that he had taken. I think he was even missing some pictures of our car, as he watched very closely as I shuffled through mine to see if we were missing any as well. People are getting so sick lately, and I blame reality TV... they seem to find chaos and other's misfortune as entertainment.

Anywho... on Friday evening, after me and my mother had just gotten finished lighting all of our new candles we had just bought, the power blinked on and off. Within the hour it had come back on, and stayed on. Our cable didn't kick back in until sometime Saturday evening... which, of course, happened shortly after we had gone to the video store to rent some movies.

It certainly was an "eventful" few days. I could never imagine being in a storm that was higher than level 1 or 2, as I think it was a level 1 by the time it reaches us with wind gusts of 60mph. And to think, our car would still be in one piece if we had not had such a rainy spring and the roots of the trees were as deep as they should have been.