The day had been very hot and humid, and the atmosphere was getting more and more oppressive.

A storm system, we had learned, was moving across Ontario, but the thunderstorms that had been predicted for earlier in the day had not come. It felt as if the sky was ready to burst.

So when rain and wind and some mild thunder and lightning finally came, no one was surprised.

Even when the wind suddenly surged to tremendous force some time after eight p.m., and the rain fell in violent torrents in every direction, some of us, especially those who happened to be in the bigger buildings, were not aware of anything more than a severe electric storm.

The guests were all safely in the main house—at a class
Fr. Sharkey was teaching.

The electric power went out; the generator was put on. That was not unusual; the power almost always gets knocked out during a storm.

At the main house and everywhere else, people quickly closed windows. Fr. Sharkey continued his lecture.

Some of us, unable to get to where we usually sleep, slept elsewhere on our property. Others, myself included, were unaware of the magnitude of what had happened until the next morning.

At around 7 a.m., I was standing in front of the main house looking with surprise at a very large tree branch lying on the grass. Peter Gravelle and Ruth Siebenaler came by.

"Combermere has been devastated by the storm," said Peter. "A state of emergency has been declared. There are lots of fallen trees and wires on the roads. The roads are closed, and no one is being allowed into Combermere."

As head of the carpentry department, Peter was about to take a walk around to check out the damage to our property and to assess what needed to be done. Ruth and I went with him.

First we walked to the sorting building where a few trees and treetops had fallen. Trees lay across two of our pick-up trucks. One was damaged, the other totaled.

Next we went to the island. We often think of the main house where the kitchen and the dining room-living room and the adoration chapel are, as the heart of Madonna House, but in another sense, it is the island.

There, in midst of a dense, mature forest, are located the cabin where Catherine lived; our main chapel, aptly called Our Lady of the Woods; and several poustinias. The island was the hardest hit of all of Madonna House.

We went first to Catherine’s beautiful Russian-style cabin, which we have left as she had it. It is our most treasured building, a place where we go and pray to our foundress. There we found the first of the near-misses.

Very close to the cabin, lying parallel to it in a yard filled with fallen trees and branches, were two tall uprooted poplars. The soft tip of a third, which had fallen perpendicularly to the cabin, was resting harmlessly against the building. Had it fallen closer, the hard trunk would probably have smashed the roof.

We walked further on. Right behind a poustinia, we came upon a straight, perhaps five-meter wide path of destruction. Bent trees, trees snapped in two or uprooted, trees lying on trees, and fallen branches were everywhere. And some of those trees were large-trunked, towering, 120–150 year-old white pines.

We walked parallel to that strip. The only thing on it, besides trees, was an outdoor jon. It had been sliced into two neat pieces by a fallen tree—a graphic image of what would have happened to anything else in that strip.

That strip is parallel to and about ten meters behind the chapel. The chapel was built in the midst of a stand of magnificent white pines, some of them close to 70 meters tall. They tower high above the chapel. Some of those venerable pines—those behind the chapel—were bent or snapped in two or had fallen. But none had touched the chapel.

Also completely unharmed structurally, though some had severe electrical damage, were the flimsy poustinias. And some of those poustinias had had people in them when the tornado hit.

On the other side of the path of destruction, perhaps ten meters from it, is a priests’ poustinia.

Fr. Tom Zoeller was in it saying Mass when the tornado hit. Trees were crashing all around him, and, distracted, he continued saying Mass. He forgot to say the Preface.

The village of Combermere is about a mile from our main house. Earlier on numerous trees—some of these, too, huge white pines—had lain across the road. But men had been hard at work during the night. By about 9 a.m., the road past our house had been cleared.

I was on my day off and decided to walk to town to see what had happened.

All along that wooded road—there are no houses for more than half a mile—I saw patches of fallen trees, uprooted trees, and trees that had been snapped in two, and power lines down and electric poles snapped and down, and then patches where nothing had happened. Logs that men had cleared of branches and and sawed into pieces lay all along the road.

A car stopped. It was Linda Lambeth, who is in charge of MH Publications and responsible for the photographs in Restoration. She was taking photos, she said. Would I care to go along? I hopped in.

We passed St. Joe’s, which appeared unharmed.

We stopped at the main street of the village where there was some damage, but it was when we looked across the river that we saw something much more serious.

The campground had suffered total devastation. We saw roofless cabins, and the very few trees left standing looked from the distance like giant matchsticks. Though we couldn’t see them from so far away, most of the trailers there were smashed.

Driving further on, we saw house after house with yards filled with uprooted trees and the tall stumps of those which had been jaggedly snapped in two. Surprisingly, some of the houses didn’t seem, from a quick look, to have suffered major damage. Several cars in front of a garage were smashed.

The road to a more severely hit part of Combernere was blocked off.

We stopped at one spot and, while Linda took some photos, I talked with a woman standing outside her house. In her yard not a tree had been left whole. "How is your house?" I asked her after she showed me what had happened to individual trees. "Just that," she said, pointing to the soft tip of an uprooted tree that rested harmlessly against her front door. Like at Catherine’s cabin.

Linda had to get back, but I walked across the short bridge that spans the Madawaska River at that narrow point. Across the bridge was such a scene of desolation that, at first, I did not recognize the place. Few trees seemed to have been left whole. The roof had blown off the hardware store, and had been carried away seemingly whole to the edge of the highway.

The road next to it was blocked, and I asked about friends who lived there. They were all right, I was told, but their yard had been devastated.

The Anglican Church near the hardware store, I was told, was unharmed. (So was our parish church between the main house and St. Mary’s.)

But the Anglican cemetery across the highway had been hard hit, and like so many of the yards, was filled with trees with every sort of damage.

The tornado at its worst (the campground) was level 2, and winds there were estimated at up to 250 km. per hour. There were, in fact, probably two tornados, or perhaps one of them was a spin-off.

What went through our island could have been a spin-off from the wider one that hit the main part of the village.

The tornado stayed above the ground, and since this area is a forestland of tall trees and small buildings, it seems that, for the most part, it was trees rather than buildings that were directly hit. Much of the damage to buildings came from falling and wind-driven trees and tree parts.

It’s amazing how little damage we suffered at Madonna House. Neither St. Mary’s nor the farm was in the path of the tornado. Regina Pacis, the residence of some of our priests, was, and there were fallen trees around it, major power damage, but no damage to the building.

The power lines on the island were also severely damaged, but except for that outdoor jon and an implement shed which was very slightly damaged, none of our buildings was harmed.

Even the beauty of Madonna House was preserved. The area around the main house, near but not directly in, the path of the tornado, looks as it did before. Its beautiful trees are still standing, and not a flower in the gardens was broken.

And what of the people in Madonna House? Probably the ones who had been in the greatest danger, besides those in the island poustinias, were those in cars.

David Williams and Alma Coffman were driving home from a town meeting (about emergency preparedness!) when the storm broke out. They drove through it, and by the time they got to Combermere, the tornado had just passed by.

No one at Madonna House was hurt, not even slightly. In fact, incredibly, amazingly, no one, not one person, in all of the village of Combermere, suffered more than minor injuries. The worst injury I heard about was a broken leg, and someone (an "unconfirmed source") said that happened when the person was doing something in his yard after the storm was over.

As for the campground, there are stories that can only be called miraculous.

A tree fell on the cab of the truck of a couple who had just arrived. They were in it, but were unharmed.

One little boy took refuge under a picnic table. A woman pulled him out seconds before the table was crushed.

Children—I don’t know how many—frightened by the thunder, went under a table in their trailer. A tree fell on the trailer down to the table and stopped there. The children were unhurt.

A tree fell on one end of another trailer, upending it. The family was in the top end and fell down. No one, not even the baby, was injured.

A tree fell in the middle of a trailer. Two people were in each end. None were hurt.

The two-story house of the owners of the campground was hit so hard that the tree went through the roof, through two stories, and all the way down to the basement.

The husband and wife and one of their daughters, all of whom had moments before been outside, were, at the moment of the hit, rushing down the stairs to the basement—at the opposite side from the hit. They were uninjured.

Another miracle happened on the highway. A car was picked up and put down three or four times by the wind. The driver, though badly shaken, was completely uninjured.

Even the journalists from the city papers are marveling that no one was killed—not even in the campground. And one of the local papers was talking about miracles.

What saved us? Perhaps the better question is: who saved us? All day Thursday, the day after the tornado, so much in my mind and heart, was Our Lady of Combermere. Others have felt this too, both in Madonna House and in the village.

We are her children. Surely it is she who spread her mantle over the village whose name she bears, the village where she is loved and honored. For, in spite of the devastation, there was not a single serious injury, and not a single life was lost.