Writing in my garden journal by candlelight, August 10, 2020. The back yard is buried in tree trunks and branches, a broad swath of devastation surrounding the 150-year old sugar maple, the King of our homestead, now deposed. The big wind has also killed the King’s household, several redbuds, a pin oak, a silver maple, a younger sugar maple probably planted when the house was built in the 1930s. Although most of the trunks are still standing, they have been stripped to bare bones. Stretching across the back yard is also a marvelous white oak, a gift from a neighbor’s backyard. We have no electricity, no radio, no TV, no cell phone service. Amidst all this desolation, we remain thankful. No one injured. The house and the garage, the garden storage shed and the garden studio--they are all wounded, with broken vinyl siding and mutilated gutters and missing shingles, but the damage is manageable: no broken windows, no leaking roofs. Change the angle of the wind by five degrees, the damage could have been much worse.
The day began hot and muggy. I spent the morning working in our vegetable garden–what we call the “Wickiup Garden”-- on a small farm northwest of Cedar Rapids. The morning was unusually hot, no breeze, no clouds. My tasks were typical August garden chores:
• Removing dead/dying foliage from cucumbers, which led me to find tiny green aphids on the underside of the cucumber leaves, a variety of aphid new to me.
• Picking a pint of blackberries (the end of the season) and a few raspberries (the beginning of the fall crop).
• Cleaning up a raspberry bed, pulling up weeds, cutting out dead canes, clearing a path around the north end of the bed, stretching a new green wire support around the east end of the bed.
• Watering a raised bed where last week I sowed radish and beet seeds for a fall garden.
• Watering sweet peppers and eggplants.
• Filling a two-gallon trug with pole beans: Kentucky Blue, Monte Gusto yellow wax, an Italian purple, some romanos.
• Harvesting two egg plants (both picked a few days past their prime), two Leysa sweet peppers (seeds from Croatia), five cucumbers, a few tomatoes.
As I was harvesting beans, the storm-warning sirens began wailing. Although I saw dark clouds to the north, the clouds to the south and west looked less threatening, and I wasn’t too concerned: no lightning, no thunder, the sky reasonably benign. But the sirens did not relent, so I abandoned the pole beans, loaded everything into the old Chevy S-10 pickup, and started the 15-minute drive back home. It was only when I reached I-380, less than five minutes from our driveway, that I realized this was a serious storm. The dark clouds from the southwest were screaming across the sky, headed in our direction. I immediately accelerated, moving as quickly as the traffic would allow. As I was turning on to Oakland Road (three blocks from home), it started to rain and within seconds it was blowing hard. When I reached Elmhurst Drive (two blocks from home), trees were thrashing violently and I had to swerve around several large branches that had just fallen onto the road. Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic. As I drove onto our driveway, there was a loud crack and a flash of light. Within seconds the security light above the garage door went out. Frightened by the torrential rain and wind, I retrieved my house key, ran from the pickup to the house, unlocked the side door, and quickly got into our family room.
The complete essay is posted as a pdf: "Life After the Derecho: The First Two Weeks"