Weather Rodeo

We had a weather rodeo last night. It was around 55F/13c at 9pm last night when the cold front rolled on through complete with heavy rain, thunder and lightening, possible tornadoes about 75 miles to the west and 60mph winds. Remarkably other than many row covers getting shredded and hanging on a fence and the grain bins being on their sides this morning, we had very little damage. None of the hoop houses were hurt, the roofs stayed on all the buildings. All good things.

What did happen was either a car hit a power pole or the pole hit a car about 1/2 mile north of us causing the power to go down for 10 hours (9pm to 7am) and a big traffic tie up with lots of emergency vehicles with their festive lights. I guess there were live wires all over US 127 causing southbound motorists to flash their lights like crazy at the northbound motorists. After 7 minutes I noticed that a state trooper had arrived on the scene and 20 minutes after that 2 ambulances and 2 fire vehicles arrived. one of the fire trucks was stationed just north of Kayler Rd in an attempt to stop more traffic from driving up near the mess and being stopped there for hours. For a while this worked until 2 semis were put into the mix.

There is no good way to turn a semi around by us. We have seen Kayler Rd stop many a semi that happened down the narrow lane. they could use our driveway/parking area but the last time some yahoo tried that he left some really swell deep ruts on our property and hit one of the cars (very lightly so there was virtually no damage and the car is ancient, but still...) so we are not trucker friendly at the moment. The truckers seemed to sense that so instead of taking the easy way out and turning around in our drive one of the truckers backed down the 40' pitch and up the other hill and curve. He had to be channeling my Dad who loved to drive backwards and told me he had many a dream where he was speeding down the interstate in reverse. When this trucker got to the valley between the hills he encountered another semi who saw the first backing up and decided whatever was up at the top of the hill was to be avoided so he got in the southbound lane and put his truck into reverse as well. It was quite a sight seeing two semis backing up 127, I gotta tell you. the other semi at the top of the hill decided to back onto Kayler Rd and turn around that way and was successful. He went down the hill encountered the two backing trucks as they had almost crested the second hill and turned off on 726. This obviously made a light bulb go off in the head of the second trucker (who was not doing a good job of reverse driving-he was not channeling my father). I saw the truck jerk as he hit the brakes and threw it into a forward gear and than the lights came on and the guy also drove off north on 726.

After all that I went into the dark house, blew out the 4 candles we had lit for light and went up to bed. I had just hit the pillow when I heard a truck coming up the hill fast and than hitting the brakes hard. He came within inches of hitting the fire truck and probably the two fire folk. After that I lay in bed with Eugene listening to the heavy winds make the metal roof boom and thunder. A rather unnerving noise. Eventually sleep came