An Afternoon with Arthur

I looked out the window on Saturday during “post-tropical storm Arthur” and noticed that there were small-to-middling sized branches on the ground all around my car. I was concerned about the windows.

I said to my mother, “Um. Do you think that the cars should be parked directly under the trees?”

“Hm. Maybe not. Let me check and see what your father thinks.”

She went out to the motor home, to which my father had retreated for some peace and quiet in the middle of the storm. (Apparently my children are noisier than a post-tropical storm.) He came in and we briefly conversed about where else we might put the cars, gathered keys, and went to the back door. I opened it, and discovered that the lull in the storm was no more.

Rain was going past in sheets, horizontally. Branches whipped in the wind. It looked like stock footage of a storm. I stood there with the door knob in my hand for a moment, and said, “I’m not entirely convinced we should go out in that… ”

I had just decided that the cars were going to have to fend for themselves, and started to close the door. “Maybe if there’s another lu…”

CRASH!!!

“Something fell on the house!” I said.

“I don’t think so,” said my mother. “This tool just fell off the dryer…”

“Something fell off the house?”

“I don’t…” said my father.

“Well, something happened to the house,” I insisted. (1)

I shuffled the kids back into the living room at the middle of the house, because I wasn’t sure what had happened. But I wanted them to be away from whatever it was. “Why?” they said. “Because!” “But why can’t we go outside and look?” “Because!” “But why?” “Because sometimes you just have to listen to what we say!” “But why?!” “Sometimes you just have to do what we say so you don’t die!” (I heard giggling as I walked back out of the living room. Not sure I got through to them, but they sat still for a couple of minutes.)

Assessed that the power was out. Unsurprising. Looked out the window. Wind roaring, water sheeting, branches tossed like so many sheets of paper.

“That tree across the road came down on the power line,” said my father. “The motor home looks a little… flat.” After a couple of hours of him sneaking out during lulls (against my protests that we couldn’t do anything about it anyway, and clearly they were temporary), he established that the CRASH had been the sound of the electrical mains coming off the house, and the stud they were attached to snapping in half and flying across the bedroom where my kids had earlier been watching a movie.

Just to reiterate all the things that didn’t go wrong: My father was not crushed by a tree in the motor home. Nobody was killed by a tree falling on them while they moved a car. My children were not impaled by a flying 2×4. The cars even came out of it intact, if not the motor home. (It wasn’t as flat as it might have been.)

And I have learned never again to succumb to the temptation to “just do a little thing” during a lull in the storm.

Also, if you need me during future storms, I’ll be under something heavy.

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1. I heard a DC-10 explode once, and the people I was with that time also insisted that it was nothing to worry about. For the record, it sounded almost nothing like thunder. Sometimes I wonder what other people do consider a noise worth noticing.