The Hail Storm from Hell

Some years ago we had a winter storm come through here and none of us remember the exact date of the thing but everybody knows what you are referring to if you just say “icepocalypse”. I have also heard it referred to as “snowmageddon” but i feel that is a title that is somewhat misleading since the amount of snow present was probably a mere 4 inches. It was the actual temperature and lack of electricity that rendered so many dead during icepocalypse; livestock and humans alike. Well, about a month ago we had a similarly disastrous event that people will remember for years to come, not for the deaths it caused but this time just for the sheer amount of damage sustained in a twenty minute period of time.

I remember seeing something building on the radar. It was a big blob of red, and then another adjacent to it, building out of thin air on the time progression video. I flipped the switch on my little red weather radio from “solar” to “battery” and extended the antenna. I tuned in to the weather station and listened to the forecast. It is important to understand something about that weather broadcast. It used to be updated by people. People would keep an eye on the weather and call in and report things that were building when they saw them with their eyeballs. We are living in a day and age where people have been replaced by computers in most scenarios. The weather is now reported by computers. This means when rain is falling, this will be indicated and then broadcast by a computer. Im hearing phrases like “radar indicated light precipitation” or “radar indicated heavy precipitation”. In 2019 the broadcast went something like “we have received reports from several sources indicating that a weather system is building north of kerr county on the west side of highway 16. We are monitoring the development of this storm and will keep you updated throughout the evening”. People would call in and report tornados. People would call in and report hail. In the country the most important thing at all times, directly beneath God on the priority list, is weather. Peoples number one phone call in the midst of a weather disaster was to warn other farmers and ranchers so they could have time to prepare before it got to them. Now there is no one to report to. There is no phone number left in existence. There is only AI. People are no longer desired as unpaid reporters… they will rely on the intelligence of computers to do the job from start to finish. Im not saying technology isnt amazing. I mean, i wouldnt be writing this blog without the recent advancements in computer technology. Im just saying, our desire to lean on AI entirely without the governance or input of humans is a poor idea. The computer doesnt have the ability to look out the window and say “those look like hail clouds to me” or “i think theres definitely a tornado or two in that big boy”. Humans do. Especially farmers. They remember the look of every cloud involved in every mean storm that dropped something unforgettable and to decide their input is no longer needed is a mistake. Computers dont care about anything but data and all the data indicated was that there was a zero percent chance of rain that night, and so thats what the weather station broadcast. I know because i saw the red blobs spring up on the radar and i turned on that little radio with the long antenna and moved it all around until i could get a good signal hoping to hear about what i was looking at. It read out the high and low temperatures in all surrounding towns and then let me know that there was a zero percent chance of precipitation. My eyeballs distrusted the radio. I wrote it off as useless and turned it off, tossing it in the rocking chair. In my opinion, in that moment, AI was ruining everything. There was clearly something over there in the direction of kerrville and i had bought the radio years ago with the idea that i’d be able to know what at all times, but AI had rendered the weather radio useless to me and i stood on the porch, sulking, looking at the foreboding dark clouds as the sun began to set. I was on my own in guessing about the severity of this thing popping up on the radar because the weather station didnt yet recognize its existence. My guess was that there wasnt supposed to be any rain and then the high temperatures had resulted in afternoon heat storms that the computer had not yet detected the presence of. The one thing i noted on the radar that made me pull the car under the cedar tree holding one end of the laundry line next to the chicken pen was that there was no green or blue on the radar. The blobs were completely red with a thin line of yellow outlining each one. The other thing i noticed on the radar time progression video was that the blobs built from dots to blobs in a very short period of time; about half an hour really. The things had ballooned out of nothing. I pulled the car under the tree and put the dogs inside as the last light of sundown left the sky. As the blobs came fast towards us on the little cell phone radar screen i wondered if i should drag some of the porch plants inside the house, just in case of high winds. I put the hanging plant on the porch floor boards at least and tried to group the potted trees together flush against the front wall of the house. I was debating whether to bring in the blackberry plants which had berries on them at the time when the wind arrived and the decision was made for me. The wind slammed against the house and bent and tossed the branches of the trees around like rag dolls. They scraped the wall of the house as they bent first right and then left in turns, leaves twirling about like they were papers in a wind tunnel. The two directions of wind seemed like an ominous development and the force with which the wind slammed into the walls of the house let me know the time to do something about any of the potted plants on the porch had come and gone. I looked at the radar and the edge of one of the red blobs was just reaching our location. I told the dogs to brace for impact and i knelt on the floor and held them as the wind made the walls pop and creak. Cashew was doing her usual storm-preparedness thing; shaking and drooling profusely as if she was having a seizure. Sili was licking the air incessantly in a nervous manner. I went over to the freestanding closet and grabbed Cashew’s thunder vest. I was fastening it on an ever-moving, uncooperative, and vibrating target when i heard the familiar ping of ice against the tin roof. I looked out the window and i could see pea sized balls of ice jumping across the porch and in the grass near the porch outside. The pea sized hail hit the window unit, the tin roof, and the shed roofs and it made a high-pitched pinging noise as it hit and then bounced into the grass. It was raining along with the ice balls coming down. I thought that would be the end of it. There would be a little pea sized hail and some heavy rain and the storm would pitter itself out. I believe i thought this because in my mind, if this were going to be a formidable storm, the weather station would have mentioned it. I was wrong and they were sleeping on the job. Unbeknownst to me, my neighbor had gotten a phone call from her friend one town over and they were just decimated by unimaginably large hail and she was calling to let her know it was headed our way. Instead of calling the surrounding neighbors…the neighbor who got the tip forgot about us. She made sure her vehicles were put up and their animals were indoors. The rest of us, not having the intel she did, were in the dark…literally and figuratively. I listened to the noise change as the pitch of the “ping pings” became a bit deeper and adopted more of a “bang” noise. The ice balls, sure enough, went from pea-sized to nickel-sized and then quarter-sized frozen projectiles. I thought to myself, “Well, the car is under the cedar tree. At least i had the last minute idea to pull it under the tree. Good thing i did that. As long as it doesnt get any bigger, maybe it will be alright.” It was at this moment that the first golf ball-sized hail balls began making their way up onto the porch. My eyes widened in astonishment as i realized my naivety. Whether or not the weather station knew about this system was going to be irrelevant to its severity. It was time i took that little red weather radio out of the equation all together. Back in 2019 it was a necessity. Now it was obsolete and useless and i was wrong to factor it in in any way. I should have used my eyeballs and there was one detail the weather station had provided which its AI had made absolutely no use of. I listened to the broadcast report come back around 3 times before turning it off, realizing i wasnt going to hear anything about the building storm. The first broadcast stated “the pressure is 27 and rising.” The second, “the pressure is 29 and rising.” The final broadcast before i switched the radio off said, “the pressure is 31 and rising”. From sheer experience and no fancy knowledge of weather patterns from book learning, i knew good and well that pressure rising = storm building, pressure holding = storm stalling, and pressure falling = storm dissipating. And here i had ignored my own knowledge and instinct because the professionals hadnt seen any chance of rain beyond zero percent. Stupid that their AI couldnt put that together and stupider still that i didnt, knowing full well what that meant. The radar indicated a lot of red and a quick moving storm. The pressure readings indicated a quickly building storm and the air outside felt hot. I stood there with my fingers pulling at the skin on my chin as i realized what this was. All that red on the radar…that was hail. This was not a rain storm with a sprinkling of hail. This was a hail storm with a sprinkling of rain. This storm had materialized so quickly and so forcefully, the precipitation would have been pulled upwards to a height where it was nice and solid and then dropped back down with a vengeance. I pulled up the image on the radar again as the golf ball sized ice pellets went “bang” all around us and the dogs whimpered and whined. I was on the phone now with family in austin trying to use their high-tech weather models to get a better picture of what was going on and how long it would last. I stared at the radar page and realized we werent even a third of the way into the red blob moving over us. This was going to get worse. As i thought this thought, “BANG!” “THWACK!” “BANG!” I looked outside and there was a baseball of ice sitting in the yard. Shit. That could definitely bust a window. Forget the car. The car was now a lost cause. The car was gone. My mind was on how to protect the dogs from flying glass. There were no interior rooms in a one room tiny house. The mattress was inside a mosquito net tent. It would have taken an act of congress to get it out of there to hide behind it. I unzipped the tent and grabbed the down comforter from the bed, throwing it on the floor. I zipped the tent back up and grabbed Sili’s leg, pulling her over to me. She hid underneath my torso. I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders. I yelled for Cashew but my voice was drowned out by the incredible noise of baseball sized globs of ice pelting the roof and window unit. I was shouting expletives at Cashew and finally she heard me and ceased her pointless sprinting back and forth throughout the one room house and came to where i was emphatically pointing with arm gestures. She looked at me as if to say, “what do you want now?” I hollered at her and pulled the blanket over her head. She then spent about ten minutes trying to escape while i held her butt in place with Sili under the blanket. It was H-O-T hot under the down comforter but it was what i had on the bed at the time and what i grabbed in the moment so we had to stay under considering that if the wind blew sideways in the wrong direction we would be inundated with broken glass. All the windows were on one side of the house but with the trees thrashing about in both directions i was pretty sure we werent going to get that lucky. For ten minutes a mixture of quarter, golf ball, and baseball-sized hail fell to the ground. Outside it looked like it had been snowing. The ground was covered with ice. I waited and prayed for it to end but at ten minutes i realized it was still going and my thoughts began to cycle around the same sentence over and over, “It has to end soon. It has to end soon.” It felt like an eternity. I thought, “Right, well, this must be how the world ends. It just hails until our roofs are destroyed and our heads cave in.” At this point my phone rings. It is my neighbor. I answer, shouting above the noise of the mammoth hail hitting the roof, “HELLO?!” My neighbor is also shouting on the other end, “ARE YOU OKAY?!” It is at this point in time that i realize i have been involuntarily shouting, SHIT, SHIT, SHIT…!” I realize this because i hear myself doing it. This may or may not have contributed to Cashew’s lack of desire to come towards me when called. I answer through the phone, confused about why she is calling me and why she is asking this question when she is just down the road experiencing the same predicament and she knows d**n well that i am not okay; none of us are okay, its raining baseball sized globs of ice for God’s sake, “NO IM NOT OKAY!” There’s no answer on the other end as im sure she realized the strangeness of the question in that moment or perhaps she just couldnt hear me over the massive noise of the commotion. I told her i had to go and hung up the phone. There was nothing either of us could do for each other in that moment and so pointless to continue the conversation and anyways i needed to focus on what i was doing in terms of damage control. At 12 minutes in i began texting every christian i knew and asking them to pray. I was genuinely bewildered and my brain was spent on how to deal with this problem. It just wasnt stopping. Several neighbors timed it. I did as well. All in all, it hailed golf to baseball sized chunks of hail for twenty straight minutes before it dropped back down to quarter and pea sized hail and then just pouring rain. Rattled by a complete feeling of helplessness and an utter inadequacy as officer of damage control…i did not go outside until it stopped pouring. I was worried the clouds still had a few baseball sized ice globs in them that might conk me on the head and render my skull cracked if i was stupid enough to venture out while the storm was still dropping buckets. So i stayed inside and i watched as the carpet of white began to wash down the driveway along with the topsoil headed for the road.

By the time i went outside this is all that was left but even this size hail would have destroyed a car pretty good.

I called my neighbor back and told her the dogs and i were fine. I checked on the chickens and they were all alive and accounted for, stupidly standing facing the wind in the rain as they always did, d**n feathered dinosaurs. She told me to collect some hail balls so we could compare them to hail from storms of earlier years. I wondered what kind of freezer she had because mine just made ice pretty much evaporate within a year but she said she had hail balls from every hail storm we had had over the years so i did as i was told and collected some for the freezer.

As i looked around i realized we had better not have any further hail storms for the next few months because all the tree leaves were on the ground and there would be no cover for the next storm.

There was mud all the way up to a foot from the roof where hail balls had hit the dirt and bounced up and hit the wall. My neighbor’s paint flaked off wherever a hail ball hit but mine stayed on so i did not have to repaint.

All of this mess was from the hail.

At this point i got the keys and let myself into the car. I turned it on and ran the windshield wipers to get all the debris off the windshield. I saw one little tiny bubble like thing on the windshield but it was as if a bubble was protruding out. It didnt appear to be a crack. I later learned it was wax. The windshield was waxed and instead of breaking the glass the hail had chipped the wax, adding air, and causing it to poof up like a bubble. I didnt find any cracks in the windshield. I knew i had a busted tail light but i figured the car was still drivable so i licked my wounds, retreated to the house (full of adrenalin) and began to check all the house windows. I thought one was cracked but it turned out just to be a spider web. Somehow i had gotten so lucky as to have none of the hail balls hit the windows of the house and the cedar tree shield the windows of the car. I checked the greenhouse and those windows seemed safe as well. I thanked those who had prayed and told my boss the car was drivable and i guessed i would be coming in to work the following day after all.

The above picture is what i walked out to when i went to do the chores the following morning. For anyone who doesnt know, my chickens’ wings arent clipped. That means they can fly. A roofless pen wasn’t going to do. I had about an hour before dawn to get all six chickens in the house before they woke up and realized they were free.

A motivating timeline and a bit of elbow grease got the job done. In 45 minutes all cages were retrieved, assembled, stacked, zip tied together, set up with hamster water jugs, and holding chickens.

They werent sure what they were doing in the house but they were in the house. It was at this moment that i notified both my directors that i would not be coming in to work that day. I would need to make work up on saturday, as the chicken pen had no roof and i would have to spend the day building one.

As it turned out, both taillights were cracked.

The window unit was also beat to heck. I tried to bend some of the metal pieces back into place with a butter knife so it wouldnt obstruct the airflow.

The car was pretty dented up.

The only thing to do was to make a run for repair supplies in Kerrville, the location of the nearest hardware store. When i got to the home depot in kerrville i realized they had experienced exactly what we did if not worse. All the skylights in the store were busted out and big trash-bag-like tarps were set over the merchandise under the skylights.

This was a car that was left parked in the parking lot of home depot because it was undriveable and would have to be towed.

The first task was to put the door to the chicken coop back together. I had bought two tubes of plaster and i used nearly all of them. Then i let that dry while i worked on constructing a roof.

The ground was littered with the bodies of little field mice who had been stoned to death by the hail.

I should mention that i spent six hours of this day meeting with a body shop, doing zoom calls with insurance adjusters, and talking to appraisers, insurance adjusters, and body shops about the possibility and logistics of getting my car repaired. It was a waste of time and a horse-load of bureaucratic crap for people to take four to six weeks to accomplish what could easily be tackled and finished in 4 hours. I mean i have never encountered a more backwards process than car repair through an insurance company. They all ought to be made to deal with themselves on the phone on a daily basis, see how seamless and intuitive their “regular practices” look then. Theres a special place in hell for all those people where all they get to do all day is listen to the transcripts of their own voices on repeat ripping people off and making their lives miserable and then acting like they’re taking the high road when reasonable people lose their shit over what they’re telling them.

Let me explain the basics of their argument. The body shop cant do anything until the insurance company says go ahead and the insurance company wont say go ahead until the body shop says what they think, and they wont say what they think until the insurance says what they think…and so on. Then, the body shop doesnt do their own appraising of the damage. No, a third party from out of town does that. But we dont know when they’re coming or how many cars they can look at per day. Instead of handing out tickets with numbers on them and calling you to the lot in batches so the damage can be appraised in organized waves like the customers at the grocery store deli counter…we will have everyone park on the lot at one time for 4 weeks and then bitch about how all these cars are taking up usable space when the appraiser is not even looking at them right now. Then the appraiser will look at like 20 cars a day and thats why your car must be parked there for 4 weeks waiting to see how much the damage will cost to fix, at which point it may take two additional weeks to send a guy out from the insurance to see if they agree or disagree with the third party’s appraisal amount and then draw up paperwork that says the body shop can start. Also, if you go through insurance you can no longer pick and choose what you want to fix; now you must fix everything. After six hours of that i fired everybody and decided to figure out how to go about it on another day. I wasnt sure what i was doing. Perhaps driving it to a body shop outside of the cities that had hail damage where rental cars with windshields existed and the body shops werent booked up a month out…but i knew i wasnt doing what they suggested was my only option so i put that all on hold and focused on fixing the chicken pen late in the day. I had to get them out of there so i could have my house back. They were doing an impressive job of pooping it up.

I climbed up and took the roof off. It was harder than it looked. Though it was in tatters, the velcroe and zipties on the edges holding it down to the metal frame bars were very much in existence and kicking. The tatters were firmly secured to the frame.

I finally got it all down.

Just as i was beginning to construct a new roof from tarps and zip-ties i noticed yet another “zero-percent chance of rain” storm building to the north west of me. I had zipties in my mouth and in my pockets and scissors and wire cutters in my apron pockets and i was trying my hardest to finish as the storm built at my back. But it inched ever closer on the radar and it did not seem likely i would even be halfway through the project before it arrived.

^ More dead field mice which the chickens would unfortunately eventually eat after thrashing them about in their beaks.

Well the brewing storm did arrive before i was finished constructing the chicken pen roof and i just let it rain on me. The tarp was water-proof. The zip ties were water-proof. There was very-little lightning in this one. So i just stood on the ladder and finished what i was doing while it rained. I do remember mumbling at the sky, “really? Really? You couldnt wait until i was finished? Really? Im not done. Im not done.” I was pretty perturbed considering i had one day to get it all done and the arrival of the storm colored how much effort went into the design. The dimensions of the tarp didnt work and i had to use a second one but now the first tarp would be too long on one side. I had already used a thousand zip ties orienting it in one direction and was running out of them and then there was the storm and the approaching hour of sundown. It was important not to obstruct the area with a cross breeze so the chickens could stay cool in the summer. So i folded the tarp over which meant water collected in the folded area and ended up being stagnant and heavy. Eventually i realized this was putting stress on the zipties and metal frame where it was sagging so i cut holes in the folded part of the tarp with scissors and let the water drain into the chicken pen through those holes. Not ideal because now the chicken pen gets wet under those holes when it rains but its the best i could do in 24 hours with limited daylight and having wasted the first 6 of those daylight hours on the car and with a house full of pooping chickens and an aussie trying to eat said pooping chickens in a nearby crate.

Eventually, after a misunderstanding and a falling out with the bodyshop in austin i bought some red tape at auto zone and gave up on fixing the taillights. I could not afford 4 weeks of out of pocket rental car and it was silly to do this when the car was still drivable. I also was not going to bow down to someone speaking to me as if i was a petulant child when i knew i was being perfectly reasonable and had purposely been very even-keeled with him because he was my last option and he had lost his temper with me over a misunderstanding of what i was asking and began shouting and then just decided apology was not an option and therefore the loss of temper on his part had to be my fault. Considering how many stupid idiots i had dealt with before him it was a d**ned miracle i didnt just start shouting back but as i said he was my last hope, which i then decided against because well, pride. My coworker said, “why dont you just buy the tail lights on amazon. My brother will put them in.” I didnt know this was an option. I made a claim with insurance. They appraised over zoom. I kept the money under the understanding that i would not fix the car and i would just get less money for it when i sold it. I then turned around and paid my friend’s brother out of the insurance claim money to buy the lights on amazon and then for his labor of switching them out. Why can a company not get this done in a couple hours? Not sure. But he did.