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Boyhood Memories from 'Tornado Alley'
by
Gregory J. Rummo
AUGUST 3, 2002
Thunderstorms exploded through the atmosphere during the first weekend of August
here in New Jersey. The displays of lightning followed by the crash of
thunder—in some cases the two being virtually simultaneous—were truly awesome.
In our neck of the woods, high winds
snapped a rotting tree off at its base. The trunk fell across the street,
blocking traffic until a few of my neighbors, aided by the local police chain
sawed their way out of suburban gridlock.
Powerful storms were the norm when I was a
kid. And they were pretty spectacular even though we didn’t have the theatrics
of the Weather Channel and Doppler radar.
I grew up in Westchester County in lower
New York State in a town called Yonkers. We lived in a small, white colonial on
Height’s Drive at the top of what was affectionately known as “Snake Hill,” so
named not because of the preponderance of snakes in the area but due to the
serpentine character of the road bed.
In the small park across the street from
our home, a US Geological Survey marker designating the spot as the highest
point in Yonkers. Three blocks from our house the Catskill aqueduct ran
underground, delivering its precious cargo to the faucets and fireplugs of
Manhattan. Overhead, following the aqueduct were high voltage lines, their taut
cables sweeping out hyperbolic arcs between the immensely tall steel towers.
It was as though our house had been
soldered onto a printed circuit board between the contacts of a huge
electrolytic capacitor. We were in fact sitting atop Westchester County’s number
one location for the conduction of atmospheric electricity.
As you can well imagine, when a thunder
storm homed in on our neighborhood, it was always a doozy, rivaling any storm
chaser’s wildest dream.
We were in tornado alley—sort of. At least
to this little boy of five years old it seemed that way.
Adding to the aura of fear and wonder was
my mother.
She was simply terrified of thunderstorms.
As a young girl, she had witnessed ball lightning—an extremely rare
phenomenon—inside a neighbor’s house. The lightning had apparently entered the
house through the chimney, scorched its way across the carpet in the living room
and exited through an open window.
Consequently, whenever the skies darkened,
at the first rumble of thunder mom would go racing through the house, shutting
all the windows until finally ending up in the kitchen with a deck of cards to
keep her mind off the impending Armageddon. The kitchen was about as far away
from the living room as one could get in that small house. And in the living
room a brick-faced chimney stood as a terrifying reminder from mom’s past.
When the storm was finally over and we
survived—we always did—it was like a home movie run in reverse. Mom would put
away the cards and race through the house opening all the windows. The cool air
would come streaming in, offering us a respite from the hot weather in an era
when air conditioning was reserved for wealthy folks, department stores,
restaurants and movie theaters.
These were the remembrances running through
my mind as I sat with my family the other night in our living room in air
conditioned comfort, hunkered down, and waiting for the storm to pass and the
electricity to come back on. The walls were bathed in the yellow glow from a
flickering candle which every so often was overpowered by the blinding
blue-white flash of lightning.
The storm eventually passed, the power came
back on and life returned to normal, the episode, like all the ones before it,
melting into the confluence of memories reaching all the way back to my boyhood
on Snake Hill.
Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist and the author of "The View
from
the Grass Roots." Contact him through his website, GregRummo.com
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