Derecho!

It is a pleasant evening on the prairie, with passing rain showers cooling away the heat of the day. The fireflies are out in force tonight. I still haven't gotten tired of seeing fireflies every night. There aren't any fireflies in Utah, so they still seem a little bit novel to me. The last few nights have been very stormy, and tonight was supposed to be the same, but it looks like it may have missed us for tonight. On Saturday evening, we waited out a very heavy storm, one that included tornadoes passing through areas we had just driven through a couple hours earlier. We took the tornado warnings very seriously, because of what we had just seen. As Sarah mentioned, we visited Parkersburg, the town that was partially leveled by an EF-5 tornado on May 25. After nearly two months, a lot of the wreckage has been cleared away into a huge pile on the edge of town, but it is still absolutely otherworldly. The southern part of town is just gone, with empty foundations, piles of broken lumber, and signs on plywood to mark the streets. When you pass into the other part of town, everything suddenly appears almost normal. It is hard to believe that what looks like a no-mans-land used to be nice houses, businesses, and the high school. The splintered trees are growing a few leaves back now, and several houses have started to be rebuilt, from the ground up. It will still be a long time for things to be normal there. Last night, after a hot July Sunday afternoon, we went to sleep, only to be awoken by a tornado warning on the weather radio. A huge storm was approaching, with a phenomenon called a derecho occurring. A derecho is a very strong straight-line wind event that extends out from the leading edge of a severe thunderstorm. As we watched the TV radar in the basement, the storm approached, with winds up to 100 mph, across a line that was about 40 miles across. It passed through about 4:00 am this morning. The wind was screaming outside, and Asher woke up in the basement, looked at his unexpected surroundings, including his train set and Libby, and said "this is fun!" It doesn't look like we got the worst of the winds, because we don't have any real damage at our house. A few trees in the neighborhood didn't do so well. Across the area, the damage was much worse, with phone poles snapped off at the ground and huge metal flagpoles bent over all the way to the ground. We are fine, though, and now I can add "derecho" to my ever-expanding list of weather phenomena I knew nothing about before moving to Iowa. The big event right now is RAGBRAI. What is a RAGBRAI, you ask? It is an absolute obsession in Iowa. It stands for the "Register's Great Bike Ride Across Iowa". Every year, 10,000 cyclists ride from the Missouri to the Mississippi, joined by all kinds of crazy characters (celebrities, costume characters, etc.) along the way. It is the largest touring bike ride in the world. The route is different every year, and the towns selected as overnight stops go all-out, with huge parties, bands, and food. The riders camp out on lawns, basically taking over the town for the night, since the event has far more people than most of the towns where it stops. As the people in the RAGBRAI know, one of the biggest myths about Iowa is that it is flat. Iowa may not have any mountains, but there are lots and lots of hills. Some of those hills are covered in woods, most are covered in corn and soybeans. None of the hills are very tall, but there sure are a lot of them. In some places, straight country roads can seem like roller coasters. Driving up to Waterloo Saturday morning (on my "shortcut"), we passed through some beautiful country. A very thick morning fog shrouded the nearby hills. It seemed like a different world. Iowa doesn't really have any "sights", nothing that really translates very well to a postcard. It has a lot of beauty, though. It always kind of sneaks up on you, in a moment when the sun bursts through the clouds and lights up a perfectly green field, or when it sets over a lazy river as the fireflies come out of the brush on the banks.