A Driveway Moment

That's a phrase that MPR uses to describe sitting in your parked car for a few extra minutes to finish listening to something on the radio. Mine served a different purpose.

I'd followed the leading edge of the storm home last night, sometimes dry, sometimes slowed to 45 by the heavy rain. All the warnings were up except for tornados, and I hadn't seen any rotation anywhere, so that didn't bother me a bit as a concern. However, by the time I reached the driveway, it was raining well and there were close lightning strikes all around.

By close, I mean that the time between the light and the noise was around a second, meaning about a thousand feet distance or less. They were coming at about three-a-minute intervals, and I decided the sensible thing to do would be to sit in the car and wait for the storm to pass over. After all, I had a book to finish, and a nearly full root beer that I'd neglected drinking while I watched the storm throwing ground strikes all along its path.

So I sat, through light rain, downpours, tiny hail, not-so-tiny hail, and of course the noise and light show. It had mostly passed by the time Paul pulled in behind me, and he just got out of his car and ran in. I was collecting my stuff when my cell rang. It was Richard, letting me know from his vantage point a block and a half away serving as election judge, that the power for the town was out (s0mething I couldn't see from in the car in daylight), and he'd just called Grandpa to let him know that we'd be there shortly.

Yep, time to go in.

Paul got busy finding and lighting candles, flashlights, and locating the crank-up radio we have for just such occasions so my dad had something to listen to. The outage was lasting a bit, so we finished off the ice cream in the freezer before that last dab melted, and my dad went to bed early, aided by Paul with a flashlight. Cellphones were set for alarms, radios and lights and other electric gizmos were turned off. Rich parked himself on the futon to sleep instead of heading down into the again-flooded basement.

I opened the doors from my room to the screen porch for some air, and turned the overhead fan on full so I'd know if/when power returned. Rich had let us know that the power company had informed the city clerk that it would be an estimated 6 hours to fix the main line in Lindstrom, another hour to fix the one in Shafer, and who knew what lay between them?

I'd asked about the machine which counts ballots, and they were lucky: the power went out late enough that the 3-hour battery backup in it was sufficient to let everybody finish voting and for them to run a tape on the results. The public works guy had brought the city generator over to keep the water tower full enough, and since it was next to city hall, the plan was to run a cord over if it had been needed for the election.

Somewhere around 4AM the fan started in my room and I knew we had power back.