Booms in the night

Apparently, I’ve reached that stage in life when I’m hearing things.
But at least I’m in good company. My wife is hearing them too.
It happened last Monday night.
I’d just returned home from covering a school board meeting, and my wife wasn’t yet back from a Friends of the Limberlost board meeting.
The weather outside was rotten and turning worse. In one of those February-in-Indiana mood shifts, Mother Nature was switching from spring-like 50s to wintry 20s in a matter of hours. Sleet, freezing rain, and snow were falling simultaneously.
(The TV weather guys like to call that a “wintry mix,” which sounds like something you’d serve to guests at a holiday party.)
At any rate, about 8 p.m., there was a boom.
That’s the only way to describe it. It went boom.
What the heck was that, I said to myself.
Having just come from a school board gathering with a group of Chinese educators, I wondered for a moment if Jim Sanders’s head had exploded. Jim, who is no longer on the board, wasn’t a fan of the administration’s China initiative.
But that theory was quickly set aside and replaced by another: It sounded as if a transformer had exploded. That was a familiar sound during the ice storm of 2005. And with the wind whipping and wires bouncing wildly, it seemed a likely theory.
By the time my wife made it home from her meeting, there had been a few more booms. They were always booms — very discrete, simple sounds. Some were in the distance. Some shook the windows of our house.
Looking back, I should have noticed that unlike the transformer booms of the ice storm, these weren’t accompanied by any flashes of lights in the sky and weren’t followed by the sound of fire truck sirens.
But, at the time, with icy conditions on the way, a reprise of 2005 seemed the most likely explanation.
By bedtime, the booms were increasing. And — though I needed to go to sleep — I found myself counting. And counting. And counting.
The booms went on. Sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., I’d counted between 20 and 30.
And sleep was impossible. Suddenly, all of the challenges of the ice storm were in front of me.
What was our Plan B if the newspaper offices had no power? What was our Plan C? What if the storm — and it was a noisy, gusty windstorm — had knocked out power to other newspapers as well? Would a power surge damage the paper’s computers? How would I find the time to write the school board story the next morning? How would we get our shopper, The Circulator, printed on Tuesday morning? And on and on and on.
Not exactly the sort of stuff you want running through your head when you need to sleep.
Finally, about 2 a.m., the booms stopped and I conked out.
The next morning, I was still concerned.
Perhaps because I had mentioned the booms in terms of the ice storm, my wife had heard them the same way I had. Like me, she was surprised to find that we still had power that morning and that the lights seemed to be on all over the neighborhood.
Morning coffee helped a bit, but not much. At 7:30 a.m. I called the office, figuring I’d need to go in early.
“Do you have power?” I asked.
“Huh?” was the answer.
There had been no power outage. There had been no exploding transformers. The lights were on. The press was already running, printing The Circulator.
So what the heck happened?
Best guess, after much speculation, is that thunder associated with the windstorm and icy rain took on a weird sound because of the sudden change in atmosphere and the very low cloud cover.
It didn’t rumble like thunder, it boomed like a bomb.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’m hearing things.[[In-content Ad]]