Western Connecticut, where I live, got hit by hurricane Irene, or what was left of it. I think they said it was just at tropical storm strength when it got here. I’ve been in worse in Florida, but this was eye-opening. It doesn’t take much to completely hose the entire power grid for the state of Connecticut.

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Connecticut is packed with old-growth forests. Old leafy trees with long branches, the kind that don’t do well in high winds. So when the tropical storm winds hit, branches came down. In some cases, actual trees came down. Right in front of my house, in fact!

There’s a bunch of tall trees around my apartment-home, and I watched some of them shaking in the wind. It was scary. There was really nowhere safe to park my car because just about every possible spot is in striking range of one big tree or another. So while I’m nervously keeping watch of the tall trees behind my house, which could hit my car, a massive double-tree, the kind where one massive old tree forks into two also-large trees about 7 feet up, snapped like a pencil.

You have no idea what that sounds like. It was like a long chain of thunder, rushing air, clattering branches, whooshing leaves, more thunder, a powerful th-WHACK, and then complete darkness as the power went out. And then you hear it hit the ground again on the bounce. Somewhere in there was also the sound of another tree being snapped by the impact, a telephone pole being snapped either by impact of by whip-lash effect, and several lines being snapped because that tree hit them hard. All of that compressed into 3 seconds. Quite the sonic buffet!

Fifteen minutes later the other half of the double-tree came down. Repeat all of what I said above, but this time it’s all happening in total darkness. Here’s what it looked like in front of my house the next day.

Downed lines blocking the driveway.

A carpet of leaves

See that part where the trees are hanging on the power lines? Look under that. See the splintered thing underneath it? That's the telephone pole. It also snapped completly off up higher, above where the power lines connect to it. Yes, the impact of the tree on the power lines whiplashed the telephone pole so bad it broke in two places.

That part where you see the exposed core of the tree, where it snapped. That's at least 7 feet up. I'm 6'5", and if I stood in the street, I could walk under the felled tree without stooping over.

Four days later a tree removal crew finally showed up.

The cats handled it pretty well, of course.

So anyway, I had no power for 5 days. It’s a special kind of loneliness to be broke, unemployed and unable to sleep at 1 a.m. surrounded by total darkness as far as the eye can see. I had a AA-battery-powered LED lantern instead of a flashlight, but that doesn’t chase away the darkness in your soul.

I felt the need to be dramatic, there. Hope you liked it. Those LED-bulb lanterns are highly recommended, by the way. I let mine run for (I’m guessing) 8 hours a day and it never burned out its first pair of batteries. I’ll never use a mag-lite again, at least not around the house.

Anyway, I DREW SOMETHING. Just once I was able to scrape the motivation together during the few hours my room actually had enough light in it during the day. Seriously it was a narrow space of time.. I have one window in my room, it is small, it has no direct line to the sun because of those tall shady trees I mentioned above, so during the day my room never really gets enough light. But I was ready on day 2, and I had been charging my iphone with my portable car-jumping-kit, so I had some photo reference available, and I cranked out one of my marker sketches! We’ve reached the end of our story, so here’s the sketch.