Jay Cronley: The painful sounds of unexpected destruction
BY JAY CRONLEY World Staff Columnist
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
4/26/11 at 5:42 AM
Here's the way hail warnings tend to run.
Hail warning.
No hail.
Hail warning.
No hail.
Hail warning.
Nothing.
No hail warning.
Hail the size of big-league chaws of bubble gum hits.
Danger zone: My mail carrier said the hail that hit his place down the way Saturday night destroyed the roof of his greenhouse.
Another report said one of the mini-meteoritelike collections of ice knocked a hole in a Rubbermaid garbage container.
Sometimes it's as if our neighborhood, Florence Park, possesses the characteristics of a reverse vortex and attracts bad weather.
What hail?
What microburst?
What power outage?
That's what you're apt to get outside the zone.
There wasn't a word on any of the local television stations about what got us.
Overturned sheds near one of the studios are filmed from all angles. Me, in my front yard dodging hail the size of wadded up beer cans full of ice, nothing.
Destructive drumming: The hail started as I pulled onto my drive Saturday night.
It didn't start small and build. It started wicked and stayed that way for about five minutes. Pummeled by ice cubes, who's counting?
In an old neighborhood, there are many single-car garages, lots of vehicles left out, lots of sounds under the storm.
You can tell the quality of a car by the deep, rich tone that hail makes on the hood.
There's a fence leading to my garage.
Racing to open it, I slipped on the hail and saw my male dog's face in the window, wondering if we would ever run through the glens again.
The sound of big hail blasting your car gets numbing fast.
Figuring the garage to be the most time-consuming course of action, I hustled to the trunk for a blanket to spread over anything that had not been knocked off the vehicle, slipped again and was struck repeatedly on the skull by clumps of ice resembling the back side of a ball peen hammer.
The banging sounds were such that I considered throwing myself across the hood of the car, but instead I got in it and drove into some bamboo for protection, the trees out front having fallen storms ago.
Original Print Headline: The painful sounds of unexpected destruction
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