Day 11: Chicago, IL to Wheaton, IL

Image of the day: Uncle Bill stands by the remains of the plum tree taken out by high winds.

Trip meter at start of day: 1,006.0 mi
Gas: None bought today

After leaving my friend Patrick at the bar last night, I walked back to my sister's apartment in the rain. When I woke up this morning, I saw reports of heavy flooding in Ohio and deaths from a lightning strike in Wisconsin. I didn't realize how bad it was about to get in Illinois.

Claire and I planned to take a Metra commuter rail train from Chicago to Wheaton, where we had left the car at our cousins' house a week earlier. The train was going to leave at 3:40 p.m., so we took a cab from her apartment to the Loop. When we got in the cab at 2:45, the sky was partly cloudy, and although the humidity was high, it wasn't too hot. When we got out of the cab 15 minutes later, the air was 10 degrees hotter and the wind was whipping us with heat like a hair dryer on full blast.

We went into the station, bought our tickets, and found seats on the train by 3:15. We were in the middle of the car, and behind us in the back of the train a group of eight men and women in their 40s who had decided to have a party on their commute back from their city jobs. It would have been rude for me to turn around and look at them, so instead I just listened to them talk behind me about chips, salsa and alcohol.

Many commuters on the train seemed to know one another. They greeted one another by name, they knew what company they worked for and in which suburb they lived. The train at rush hour had become its own little community.

This train, however, wasn't leaving yet. Five minutes before the train was supposed to depart, the conductor announced a delay because of severe weather and tornado warnings. Several women came on the train, drenched in what they described as "sideways rain that just came out of nowhere." The train left 15 minutes late, and we were on our way to Wheaton.

When we got through the suburb of Elmhurst, we started to see the damage. Fences had been blown over. Trees three feet wide were sideways on the ground, their roots showing like God hadn't gotten around to planting them yet. The train traveled for miles, and we never saw a single house with the lights on.

When we got to the station in Wheaton, our aunt and uncle picked us up and drove us through a town of non-functioning stop lights, huge downed branches and large trees split in two. We finally got to their house, which had no power, standing water on the front lawn and a plum tree that the wind had snapped in half behind the house. Power, they said, could possibly be out for the entire weekend. It was early evening and the sky was already darkening with more storm clouds, so we gathered flash lights and candles, and started drinking cocktails in anticipation of a long night. Uncle Bill had just put potatoes and steaks on the grill (the electric stove and oven were out of commission) when the second wave of the storm hit. He grilled in the pouring rain, going outside every few minutes to check on dinner.

As the storm got worse and worse, Claire, Aunt Jane, Uncle Bill and I stood in the living room and looked out at the front yard. Hudson, the dog, never acknowledged the storm for a second, and was seemingly not bothered by the thunder and lightning. The only thing that concerned me was when the water in the front yard got to within 18 inches of the front door; the best sandbagging material at our disposal was half a bag of cat litter.

After dinner, the storm calmed down and the water receded from the front door. The "lake" in front of my cousins' house had crested, and the only evidence of damage to the property was Aunt Jane's lamentations of, "Oh, my plum tree!" Claire and I tried to entertain ourselves by playing mancala, but I stopped after two games and went to sleep at 9:30.