We spent this weekend in Southern Illinois for the Murphysboro Apple Festival. It was supposed to rain the entire weekend, but we lucked out; it was sunny and hot and extremely humid Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Great carnival weather.
But on Sunday when we woke up, it was windy and rainy. We reflected how great it was that the weather had held off a day. What we didn’t realize, since we were on vacation and not paying attention to the news, was that this wasn’t a Midwestern rainstorm—it was Hurricane Ike plowing a soggy path toward Chicago.
We found out soon enough. The Lake of Egypt is a beautifully warm, calm lake built to cool the turbines for the coal-burning plant at its terminus. Because it’s a lake, and because it’s warm, there are always lovely breezes out there. Yesterday, those breezes bared their teeth. The windows rattled, the door strained against its latch. There were whitecaps on the lake, and swells that were enough to surf on, spray crashing on the rocks around the point. I’ve never seen breakers on the lake before.
My father-in-law peered anxiously out the windows, talking about how he’d once found a porch chair in the lake, how they’d had downed limbs earlier in the summer, how the dock had blown off and drifted down the cove into someone else’s dock, the lengths to which he’d gone to make sure it didn’t happen again…metal stakes sunk in concrete, chains, etc. He wandered over to the kitchen window, which overlooks the pool and the boat dock, and suddenly he started shouting. The whole household clustered around the little window as the dock strained against its tethers, and then, slowly, broke them. It swung its ponderous bulk around the point, attached to the shore by a single chain and the PVC-enclosed power line that runs the boat hoist. Seconds later, the metal cap over the motor for the pool cover caught an updraft and flipped up into the air. Pool toys spilled off the veranda and across the bricks to the pool.
That was when Christian and I began to wonder if we really needed to be driving into town to go to church.
Soon after, the winds backed off to a level where we all felt safe going outside to try to clean up the mess. Dad and Mark went down to the remains of the dock with rope and tied the dock to the oak trees on shore with knots that pay compliments to their Boy Scout days. And eventually we made it to church (in the middle of the homily), and got on the long road home. But it was definitely an exciting morning at the Lake of Egypt.
Kathleen M. Basi 