It's Not Always Fun...

This past October was a bad month for St. Charles as well as surronding areas of Kentucky and Indiana. A tornado swept through the area damaging homes and destroying a few mobile homes in our area. It was the first tornado to hit the area since 1935. It actually came across the back part of our property, going diagonally across the woods and crossing Buttermilk Road, and heading on a north-eastern path into Indiana. Out of the 13 acres of trees that we had on the property I'd say at least half of the trees were damaged or destroyed.

The amazing thing is that there were four large trees on three corners of the cabin and each one was blown over, however, all of them fell away from the cabin! Other than a branch striking the rear corner of the cabin pulling loose a little of the gutter, no damage was done to the cabin. All of those trees should have fell onto the cabin, crushing it to pieces.

Of course there were trees everywhere on the ground and a few blocking the entrance lane. I received the news from the former owner, Bobby Rice, and he was kind enough to go to the cabin and check it out right after the storm passed. He took some pictures and e-mailed them to us and it a blessing to know that the cabin was still standing.

I arrived at the cabin a couple of days later and began getting a path made into the place and removing the fallen trees. It took 3 days for the power to get turned back on and for water to flow. I spent a lot of the first few evenings visiting my neighbor Dewey Cranor. He's the kind old man that takes care of the well on our property which used to supply water to six families. Now that the tornando destroyed a couple of the homes that used the water it's just us and Dewey using the water.

By the third day I had the lane open with the help of Ronnie Young, a local contractor. He did a great job of moving the trees and cutting up some of the large ones that fell around the cabin.

At the end of the first week Kim decided that she couldn't live any longer without me and she took a week's vacation to come and help out with the cleanup. Sadly, that was the weekend that her uncle Albert passed away so we took a couple of days off and drove to Florence to attend the funeral and be with family.
When we returned to the cabin we put in some long hours for the next four days. By the time we had to leave we had it looking pretty good in the front and in the back around the area close to the cabin. There was still tons of trees and branches to remove but we'll be working on that for the next 5 years!

About a week after we came back home, Will, Lindsey and the kids went down to help with the cleanup along with Lindsey's sister Molly and her husband Chad. Will swears that it was a lot of fun for all of them every though they must have cut a couple of acres of trees! I'm sure it will look a lot different when we go back and maybe now we'll only have 3-4 years of cleanup left! The grandkids had fun and no fingers were lost with the chainsaw so it was a good trip.

This would be a good time to praise the strength of a log cabin! All those trees were uprooted or snapped in half and our logs making up the walls of the cabin just stood up to the wind and took the full force of the storm.

Kim and I can't wait to get back up there and do some more cleaning up. Hopefully we'll make it in late January.