But one particular night still lives in Rochester folklore. A night when Mother Nature stood up and screamed "you think this is YOUR planet? You think YOU'RE running the show? I'll show YOU who's running the show!"

For those that don't know, an Ice Storm is when freezing rain hits, and the temperature is still well below freezing. I don't know the meterological specifics, but basically what happens is the entire area is covered with water and then that water turns quickly to ice. The world quite literally becomes frozen in ice.

I remember only bits and pieces of the night it all happened. I was awakened very late at night to a tree in my room. It had fallen through my window and was now poking through my room only a few feet away from me. Outside it literally sounded like a war was going on. Enormous crashes, sirens, bangs, pops, and impacts.

For those that can't figure it out (as I couldn't at the time), most objects can't really withstand having 500 pounds suddenly added to its frame. Especially trees. They hate that. So what happens is that too much ice will encase a branch and then the branch falls. Too much ice encases a tree, and the tree simply topples. Old roofs and whatnot just collapse. And I'm not just talking about rickity sheds or small baby trees. I'm talking gigantic oaks will just come crashing down, destroying whatever happens to be in it's way. Magnificent old houses will shudder and topple. Office building windows get covered in ice and the entire sheet of ice some dozens of feet in area, will slide off whatever floor it is on and smash to the ground. Power lines and poles falling everywhere, on a city-wide scale (Rochester is by no means a small town). It was a total war zone.

We didn't sleep the rest of the night as I recall. The power went out all over the city at around midnight. We just stood huddled around candles in our basement listening to walkman radios for news and looking outside at the deafening noise of the sky falling just outside our range of site. Occassionally, a falling tree would tear through part of our home.

I can't really find much documentation on the net (this was a few years before the net "broke" but as I recall damage estimates as high as 5 or 6 billion dollars where being tossed around for that first night alone. The only thing that can really come close to the experience would be a major earth-shattering earthquake or volcano explosion. Martial law was declared before the sun even rose. The entire city was without power, and a good fifth without homes.

I remember when the sun finally rose, the morning after that violent night, when everybody first stepped out of their homes and took a look at the world around them.

It was, in a word, magnificent.

For those that haven't seen something like this it is almost impossible to describe or even convey. The first thing that struck you was not all the damage, the live electrical cables sputtering about in the streets, 75% of the trees lying horizontal, many on objects, the house next door looking like somebody had picked up a hundred year old oak and simply smashed it right through the middle of the structure, all the damage, all the destruction. No, the first thing that struck you was how awe-inspiringly beautiful the world looked. Everything sparkled. Everything was covered in ice, reflecting light in all directions. The world looked like it was encased in an exoskeleton of diamonds. The trees, the houses, the bushs, the grass, the street, everything. It was brilliant, it was so bright you had to put on sunglasses. It looked like some other world, some other planet, some fairy tale. We went to bed in just another suburban neighborhood and woke up in a land of fairydust. Indescribable.

After that wore off then the sheer power of the violence was seen. Decimated is a good word to use to describe what the city looked like. Like in The Regulators by Richard Bachman, it looked like some roaving band of people with enormous cartoon guns rode through the city and just destroyed everything in sight. It took your breath away. The city had, in a word, fallen.

My mother and new baby sister were in Kansas thank God visiting our family (where ironically enough they braved a tornado practically upon getting off the plane) and when we managed to contact them my father simply told his wife "I think you should just stay there another week or two." So it was me my dad my brother and my sister, the kids all around 12. I can't imagine how we got through it intact. If the power goes out for more then 30 seconds these days I go fucking batshit. We, like many, were without power for 16 days. 16 DAYS!!! It was like camping. We were stranded in the wilderness of suburbia.

The damage didn't stop that first night. The Ice Storm lasted another few days, though that first night was by far the worst and the nights that followed mostly consisted of "aftershocks". More problems arose when the ice started melting. Watching literally a ton of ice fall off a 9 story office building onto a parked car is pretty fucking cool albiet a bit of a shock. There was also a helluva lot of human goodness. It became like one big foxhole. Community spirit. There was one guy on the block who had a generator and he would spend his day going up and down the neighborhood plugging it into each house for about an hour. People let the people whose houses didn't fair to well stay with them, oftentimes complete strangers. People donated what they could to others, gymnasiums became shelters, a group of men would among falling ice and trees brave the weather to fix the old ladies roof down the street as quickly as possible, a neighborhood effort was made to track down the two missing dogs of our neighboor (who tucked tail and ran from the backyard the second the fence was smashed beyond recognition, we were all worried about all the downed live powerlines but they turned out okay). It really helped bolster my opinion that human beings are all basically good.

In any case after a few weeks order was finally restored and the city started rebuilding itself. Power came back on (that was a great day), roofs were mended, insurance companies declared bancrupcy, etc etc.

But I can't tell you how awesome the world looked that morning we all came out of our homes, rubbed our eyes, and stared at the world as if seeing it for the first time.

But I'll certainly never forget it.