Saturday night was an odd
night. I was in Connecticut visiting a friend's place
overnight. We went out to dinner, had a nice time, got home and
went to our respective beds. Just after midnight, I started to
hear creaking and crackling noises from outside. Later, I started
to hear branches breaking off of trees. And I don't mean far off
in the distance, I mean right outside of our window. You see, his
house is in your usual suburban town, but there are hundreds of
trees in the area. In fact, there's a large hill behind his house
that is largely undeveloped and is essentially a forest.
As the night went on, the frequency of falling branches and trees
increased. Every 20 of 30 seconds something huge would creak,
crack and make a huge sound as it hit the ground. It's hard to
describe what this sounds like without actually being through it.
The worst part of every falling branch is that long period in
between when the branch actually breaks off and it hits the
ground. You don't know what it's going to hit. It could be your
car, could be the house that you are trying to sleep in, could be
something else.
Because of this, I couldn't slepp. I can't sleep as it is, and
even though we were sleeping on the first floor of a two story
house, I didn't feel safe in the corner next to all of the trees
so I went out and tried to sleep on the living room floor.
At about 2:15 in the morning, I was lying there trying to go to
sleep and the sky outside suddenly turned bright blue and there
was a distant sound of something going terribly, terribly wrong.
And then the lights went out. And they stayed out.
I wandered around the house, looking for a candle and a lighter
and listened to huge branches hit the houses in the neighborhood.
At about 4am, a branch fell, hit my car and set off my car alarm.
Some time after that, a huge branch fell and hit the roof of the
house with the sound of 1000 glasses crashing to their deaths (all
that ice.) My friends finally woke up; one of them had been
snoring for hours.
Once the sun came up one of my friends and I went out to look
around. One of the neighbors had had the windows smashed out of
his car. My car looked OK, but my friends had a cracked
winshield. There were lots of branches down but not too many
whole trees that I could see. I think this storm was much worse
in my imagination than it turned out to be in real life.
I'm still waiting for my sleeping schedule to return to normal.