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STARRY STARRY NIGHT

 The weather in the south of Wisconsin has descended into one of heated clouds dropping sheets of rain, bolts of cloud, and ground-strike lightening and moving air that whirls in wildly unpredictable vortexes that are simply coats of heated and fetid moisture-laden air like that experienced in other parts of the world and referred to as monsoons.  Seeing the heavens at night has become a minimal and special experience.

The new Yerkes Observatory is trying its best to continue what the old one started with what are called Star Parties.  Many of the observatory’s small yet powerful portable telescopes are taken out, set up, and then populated by visitors who are coached in what’s ‘up there’ by professionals who normally inhabit the observatory quietly unobserved during regular open to public hours.  Whether the Star Party will go off as planned Thursday night on the Hillmoor parcel of land at nine p.m. (or thereabouts, as the sunset will occur at 8:36 and last light at about nine twenty) will go off or not is anybody’s guess at this point.

Tickets for the Star Party are available HERE

The Geneva Shore Report goes to print on Tuesdays to be distributed on Wednesdays (except for the early late Tuesday deliveries to Amy’s Shipping Emporium and very few other places).  Storms continue to plague the area around the lake almost every night.  Will Thursday night be clear to allow for the viewing of a starry night?  The storm that brutally struck the area early in the night on Sunday was very strange and special.  These mini tornadoes or vortex areas of swirling winds came down and struck very select areas of Williams Bay and then directly across the lake to Town of Linn properties.

The publisher of this newspaper stood at his front door observing the storm, not fully realizing what was going on in front of him as he viewed the expanse of his front yard, the area surrounded by forty-to-sixty-foot trees of some age.  There was no funnel cloud observed, nor much warning at all that the storm might be different from so many others.  The sirens went off, and the rest of the family went to the basement, but he stood to see what was going on.  All of sudden, out of nowhere observable or with any kind of warning a wind began blowing from what had been practically nothing.  For only eight to ten seconds the trees started blowing severely, twisting their branches among one another, their tops literally twirling and then rapidly recovering to do so again.  The sound was a crackling sharp-edged tearing sound before it was gone and then then the wind died.

What happened next was also totally surprising.  A sky of leaves and twigs began to fall all over the area, covering the grass and driveway with a carpet of vegetative matter.  The vortex had sucked the leaves and smaller branches of the surrounding trees up into the area and then released the whole load when it passed.  Some of the bigger trees were later found to be split down in the center.  Over in Williams Bay and then along the northern shore of the Town of Linn piers and boats were picked up and then jammed back down atop their piers or thrown onto the shore, terminally damaging many of them.  The beautiful Hedlund property, part of the country club, or 409 Club estates, lost eight giant oak and maple trees but the house, with the trees surrounding it close in, was untouched.

After the vortex passed our publisher finally went to the fortified basement, reflecting for long after that being in a tornado is not at all like watching one on the television at some sort of safe distance.  There will be no standing indoors to see what’s going on in the future.