(Unhappy pick-up truck on George Mason Drive next to Big Pink on Friday night after the Derecho event. Photo Sara-1).

It was hot. My back hurt and the leg ached dully. My skin was sticky. I wanted to be in the pool, but there are still raw openings in the incision and you know what people do in the pool.

Man, is life fragile, or what?

I was thinking about that after I woke at two-thirty Saturday morning in the dead of the night. I had been reading in bed after returning from Willow Friday night, me being the Poster Boy for Cabin Fever.

I retreated to the meat-locker coolness of the back bedroom and continued my assault on a book-a-day reading program. My eyes began to flutter, and I put down the tablet reader around nine- thirty in the little pile of support equipment on the bed next to me- phones, table , that stuff- and closed my eyes.

Sleep patterns have been a challenge and rest fitful since the operation but gradually improving. I woke in sudden sullen silence, thirsty, and felt something was wrong, just like when the air conditioning went out of the ship, and I knew we had suffered an engineering casualty or maybe something worse. I swung the leg brace out over the floor and used it to leverage myself out of bed.

I grabbed the crutches and hobbled out to the kitchen for a drink of water.

The darned light in the stove hood was out- I made a note to replace it when daylight came-but why was the door to the balcony closed? That was a mystery. I had secured the sliding rod that binds the door to the frame with a pair of Vise-grip pliers to ensure it stayed open, and for the life of me could not remember removing them and buttoning up the place the night before.

I stopped taking the narcotic palliatives weeks ago, but was I losing my mind? Had someone been in here? How many glasses of wine did I have before bed?

Curious.

I opened the reefer and the light did not come on. Power out. Crap. Sleep was banished with the puzzling events. I got horizontal again, and read for an hour or two, then checked email on the tablet after switching from the home wifi connection to the Verizon network. There was a link to a Facebook update from Sara-1. It featured a picture of small Japanese pick-up squashed by a massive oak tree. Sara-1 lives only a bloop single across the parking lot. What the hell was going on?

Really curious. I found a position on my right side in which the brace was not too intrusive a presence and drifted off for an hour before the daylight was fully up.

The appraiser was coming between eleven and noon, and I realized I needed to get the place in some sort of order. Start with the mystery of the back door. The pliers were popped open and on the floor.

Then, I was mildly surprised to find I could not open without a hefty shove. The footstool was upended and tangled in one of the aluminum lawn hairs and the metal planter. The cushions on the Adirondack chairs were gone.

Black potting soil from the planter was strewn everywhere, and white flecks of paint were mingled to present a discouraging mess atop the gray paint of the balcony floor. It looked as through something had scoured the white concert of the pillars that frame the dusty mauve glazed bricks that give our building its rakish nickname.

Down below I could see my cushions on Tony’s patio, and The Queen of the Dogs was talking to him with animation. “Hey, Tony!” I shouted. “Mind snagging my cushions? I will come down if the elevator is working!”

“Sure, Man.” Tony is sporting a beard. A lot of things pass you by when you have missed the change of season. That was not all. The furniture from the pool deck was actually in the pool along with branches from the maples that now rise more than halfway up the eight stories of the building.

Damn, I thought. This was big-how did I miss it?

Jiggs and Ludmilla invited me to dinner via cellphone, which still had a charge.

We were on emergency generator power from the big diesel in the garage, and one third of the circuits to the unit had power. I had garbage disposal, no reefer. Walk in closet light, no television or internet. That sort of thing. The appraiser called to reconfirm his appointment, and I realized I had to get hot on cleaning up the place.

I assaulted the guest bedroom where the Ensign and his buddies had stacked furniture to make the rest of the place wheelchair-friendly.

The apartment looked almost presentable for the appraiser when he eventually showed. Commendable work ethic, I thought, considering most of the traffic lights in Arlington County were out and traffic was a mess with citizens prowling for gas and ice.

When the appraiser was gone I went back to bed, I did not get an eye-witness account of the savage ten minute strike until after I tucked a bottle of 14 Hands Winery “Hot to Trot” red blend (generous aroma of berries, cherries and currants) in the back pocket of my cargo shorts, mounted my crutches and hobbled to the Service Elevator.

This experience with temporary disability has opened my eyes. The cheapskates on the condo board had considered not upgrading the generator when we replaced the aging elevators last year. Sweet reason prevailed, and we did, though the neighborhood was dark, we could charge phones and tablet computers and run a fan, if we chose.

And I could ride the one working elevator down four flights to the lobby.

When I first moved to Big Pink, the generator didn’t work, and when the power went out, the entire structure went cold iron. Pity the elderly on the upper floors. No way out but the stairs.

Jiggs lives on the ground floor on the front of the building, and his patio had a working outlet, over drinks and sizzling steaks he described what it was like when the wall of wind and rain slammed into the building and lightning hit the security light right in front of his place.

Amazing, I thought. Slept right through it.

I kept thinking that the power would come back pretty swiftly- I mean, we are on a major east-west artery, and how hard could this be, but the murmur from the radio was sobering. 90% restoration was estimated by PEPCO (Maryland) and Dominion Power (NoVa) to be at the end of the week or beyond.

The explanation was clear. Big storms- our hurricanes like Irene and Isobel- gave us days to prepare and power crews were able to pre-stage from locales as far away as Oklahoma. Not with this one.

That was a little different than the “possibility of thunderstorms, some of them severe” that I heard about before going to Willow. What hit the building was a wall of 70-80 mile winds that ripped trees, hurled lightning, and was there and gone in a span of ten minutes.

Leaving us completely screwed.

It is worth talking about what this monster was. The phenomenon is not what some have termed an unprecedented demonstration of Mother Nature’s punishing wrath for our environmental sins. They’ve been known over a century, and named “Derecho,” the Spanish word for “Straight.”The term was first cited in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 by Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs, who wrote about a significant derecho event that crossed Iowa on 31 July 1877.

Derecho events happen about every four years in this neck of the woods, but not like this one. We know a lot more about them from the data amassed by the advent of Doppler weather radar.

Derechos are typically bow or spearhead-shaped on weather radar, and hence they are also called a ‘bow echo’ or ‘spearhead’ radar echo. This one formed near Davenport, Iowa and roared east in a curved massive linear front, clipping the southern edge of Lake Michigan, scouring Ohio and West Virginia, and then intensifying in a red mass of energy crossing the Blue Ridge to slam into Big Pink in a little over 14 hours.

If I had internet, I would have told you about it. As it was, I had a great meal with Jiggs and Ludmilla, and hobbled back to the lobby where I could hear the roar of the generator in the basement giving us a whiff of hope that things would be OK.

Then I put myself back flat on the bed next to the fan, and prepared to sweat until morning.

Tomorrow: Refugee

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com