A hurricane blew through North Carolina and did its best to blow away Chapel Hill. After watching hurricane Edouard pass harmlessly by less than a week ago, we took hurricane Fran straight in the face. At my house I lost power for about 28 hours and had no water all day Friday. WCHL reported that others could have to wait as long as a week to get electricity back. Both Orange Water And Sewer Authority’s water treatment and waste water treatment plants went down in the storm and although they got power back late Friday, OWASA warned people to boil any water they intend to drink and issued a mandatory water conservation order because the waste water treatment plant was still flooded and could not yet process incoming waste water.

The storm was still chewing up areas southeast of us when the power went out at around 8:30 Thursday night. I promptly lit the candles I had brought home less than five hours before and applauded myself for my foresight. Then I figured I better get rid of some of the milk that I knew would go bad before the blackout ended, pulled out the nearly full gallon I had just bought the day before and cursed myself for not thinking ahead. I poured a bowl full of milk and set out to eat some Apple Jacks cereal. I hadn’t eaten Apple Jacks since I was a kid but I saw them at Wall Mart for only $2.50 a box and, well, who can pass up Apple Jacks for only $2.50 a box? Not me.

So there I was, under the candlelight, with my bowl of milk and my box of Apple Jacks. I was feeling elegant, believe me. As I remembered from my childhood Apple Jacks eating days, the way to do it properly is to pour the milk first and then pour in just enough Apple Jacks to cover the surface of the milk (Apple Jacks float, see.), eat them and then pour in the next bowl full. That way you’re always eating fresh crunchy Apple Jacks which adds even more pleasure to an already wonderful experience.

After eight bowls of Apple Jacks, I tried calling my brother Jim. Whether one action inspired the other, I don’t know. It’s just how it happened. Anyway, there was no answer. Fortunately, phone service was not interrupted by the storm -- unless, of course, all of your phones were the fancy cordless ones which require electricity to operate like Jim’s were.

I had an extra phone and I decided to brave the storm and take the phone to Jim’s house. It didn’t take much bravery. Wind blew and rain fell but neither came heavily. After visiting Jim and Elizabeth for a while and seeing that they were well set with candles and, now, a working phone, I came back home to ride the storm out. I called Jim again when I got home. No answer. Then I remembered that even a regular phone doesn’t ring when the ringer is turned off. Well, it was the thought that counts.

As I sat in my candle-lit house waiting for the hurricane, a funny thing happened. The power came back on. Wow, that was easy, I thought. I blew out the candles, went to bed and turned on my bedside stereo receiver (with the speakers hanging on the wall right over the bed -- it’s so cool) so I could drift off into peaceful slumbers listening to the dulcet melodies of the local jazz station.

BZZZRRZZZ! hissed the stereo when a lightning bolt struck nearby as I bolted up out of my sweet dreamland. Good sense took over and I turned the lights on just long enough to unplug the stereo and all the other important electronic equipment in the house. Still, the storm didn’t seem like too big a deal when I went back to bed and fell asleep around 11pm.

Something woke me around 1am and I saw that the power had gone off again. I got up, used the bathroom and them Jim called. "I can’t sleep," he said. Like there was something I could do about it. "Trees are going ‘snap! snap! snap!’" he said. Unlike my house, his is almost surrounded by trees, a fact I had always lamented until now. "Hang in there," I told him. "You too," he said. We rang off.

He told me later that he had all the windows of his house open in case there was a tornado. Apparently if a tornado comes near your house but doesn’t strike it, it can still destroy your house because of the air pressure difference between the tornado and the house, which causes the house to explode. Opening the windows is supposed to help equalize the pressure. Not knowing this, my windows were closed and I was able to sleep. Meanwhile, Jim, Elizabeth and their dog ended up huddled in the bathroom because it is the only room in the house that has no windows and is the only one in which it was quiet enough for them to sleep.

Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

Not that it was totally quiet in my house. I could hear the howls of wind whipping by and the storm seemed to produce a hum like a large generator would make. If it hadn’t been pitch black, it would have been something to see. Lying in bed trying to sleep, I heard a big thud that I thought might have been one of the patio decks tearing off from my house. I went to my kitchen and looked out the window at one of the decks. I couldn’t see anything. Even when I opened the window all I could see was black. I couldn’t even see the deck’s railing, which can’t be more than two feet from the window. I assumed it had been torn off, figured there was nothing I could do about it at the moment, and went back to bed.

The next morning I saw what had probably made the noise I heard. It wasn’t my deck, which was perfectly intact just like the rest of my house, but a tree behind a house two doors down from mine. It had toppled over and landed on some power lines, tearing the connection to the house and the power meter right off of the house.

It was a common sight in the area. Late in the afternoon, tired of eating potato chips as a meal, I drove into town looking for some real food. Along the road, reminders of the hurricane’s wrath stood everywhere, sometimes in the way. Trees lay draped on power lines like punch-drunk boxers collapsed against the ropes. Others had fallen flat to the ground or the road and two that I saw had fallen from one side of the street to the other but had been "caught" by stronger trees on the other side, creating an arbor archway over the road.

The hurricane hadn’t killed the whole town but it sure looked that way. Traffic lights were out, stores were closed, their parking lots empty and people seemed to be driving around just for the exercise of it since there didn’t seem to be any place to drive to. Finding food didn’t seem likely. But as I approached Franklin Street, there were a few stoplights working and I grew hopeful when I saw someone eating a Subway store’s sandwich. Civilization!

Good. Hurricane Fran had given us some excitement and done a lot of damage but we had survived. At 1am Saturday the power company came with its chainsaws and freed the power lines from the fallen tree two houses down from mine and a few minutes later I heard the refrigerator click back on and saw my clock radio begin flashing "12:00".

We had indeed survived.

John

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