–Calm Before The Storm, sunset at the Brookview Park Ice Cream Social, August 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
The power went out at 11p.m. Monday night. A ferocious storm raged through the Twin Cities, the second in three days. Cloud to ground lightning flashed continuously every few seconds. Thunder rolled, hail pelted the air conditioner, the wind whipped rain across the deck boards.
I was posting this photo to Flickr when the lights blinked on and off a few times and boom! – nothing but dark. Except for the heat lightning. Liz describes this kind of storm as the disco ball effect. She says it in her warmest weatherwoman tone as if she was saying temperature inversion or greenhouse effect. The storm last Saturday night woke me up out of a dead sleep. Liz was already awake chanting, “disco ball, disco ball,” in my ear. It took me a groggy minute to figure out what she was talking about.
But by Monday night, I needed no explanation. Between strikes, I lit the three-wick candle on the bureau. Smoke from the long stemmed match set off the fire alarm above me. Liz ran in to see what was going on and we bumped into each other trying to reach the alarm. We cracked each other up as we vigorously waved our arms below the blinking ceiling orb, hoping to dissipate the smoke. “What *else* is going to happen!” we laughed.
Finally, things settled down. The three cats hid under the bed, we grabbed two flashlights off the shelves, turned off anything that had been running on electricity, found our battery operated radio, and listened to the weather report. It didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
A few hours earlier, we had attended a community ice cream social at Brookview Park. A 9 piece polka band, the Jolly Czechs (this is Minnesota after all!), played for a large crowd of all ages, while we strolled along the edge of the pond taking photographs. The storm clouds were already rolling in when everyone stood up from their lawn chairs to sing along, hand over heart, to the Jolly Czechs finale – America the Beautiful. Or was it God Bless America?
The sunset in the photograph is the calm before the storm, the third of three photographs I was uploading when my laptop ground to a halt. The recent heat-hazed skies, high humidity, and violent storms have made for some great photography this summer. But I didn’t feel like shooting the storm.
After we had the candles in place and the fire alarm stopped beeping, we sat down on the couch by the window and stared out at the storm. Water rolled in torrents down the road, branches cracked and fell, we were nearly blinded by fiery flashes that backlit sheets of rain.
When we lose power, I suddenly feel disconnected to my everyday life of electronics, computers, fans, clocks, air conditioners, washers, dryers, and refrigerators. And tossed into the backwater of a time before electricity. There was a certain courage people had to have to brave the elements. Particularly in the Midwest, where winter storms could be life threatening.
I was thinking about Laura Ingalls Wilder when I curled up beside Liz and fell into complete and dark silence. Transformer down, wires crossed – everything stops. I prayed one of the leaning oaks didn’t fall forward over the house. And drifted off to sleep.
-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
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