The Storm's Wake

A massive, fast-moving and incredibly destructive storm whipped through Western New England this afternoon. Just my luck: I drove through the whole thing, making my way south from Vermont to my family's home in the northwest corner of Connecticut before heading to New Zealand next week. I've seen my share of tempests in my time in the mountains, but I don't recall ever having seen rain fall that hard or lightening strike so often, so close together, and so destructive (I'm not sure we really call them rain "drops" when they're the size of tablespoons). We won't know the full toll of it all until morning, but in driving through the Berkshires I saw a few enormous and ancient oak trees ripped from the ground roots and all and several near misses of tree trunks and houses. By 6:00PM it was all over, the skies cleared and gave way to some beautiful mists rising from the hillsides.

Friends and colleagues in Vermont often assume that all of Connecticut consists of the coastal suburbs of New York City that are so far from here, literally and figuratively, and they often express surprise and cynicism when I explain how rural and how mountainous it is here in our corner of the world. Our mountains may not be big, I tell them, but they do behave big. That was certainly the case today!