There’s just something strange about hail. Rain is normal. It’s liquid and it nourishes the soil and makes things grow. And when it hits us, it doesn’t hurt. Hail is ice from the sky that falls in summer. That doesn’t even make sense.
During a recent storm, a volley of hail hammered the metal roof of our house, sounding like a burst of machine gun fire. There was no pitter-patter like rain—just a sudden attack. In an instant, the lawn was white with one-inch balls of ice. And in a minute, it was over. Curious, I went outside to examine the situation. Every snowflake is said to be unique and the same could be said of hail. I picked up one of the larger pieces that was round in the middle and had tiny spikes radiating from the perimeter, looking like a cartoon sun. Ironic, considering the sky was pitch black and threatening Armageddon.
Iowa is no stranger to hail. Several times a year, hail pounds our roofs and tulips. It makes perfectly smooth automobile hoods look like the surface of a golf ball. One of the worst hail storms ever in Iowa occurred on 2004 in Story County and Hancock County when they were hit with softball-sized hail measuring five and a half inches across. That’s bad, but South Dakota still has us beat. In 2010, nine-inch hail bombarded parts of the state. Imagine being outside getting pelted with chunks of ice the size of volleyballs! But as bad as that is, at least in South Dakota it never rained frogs.
On June 16, 1882, the year Edison opened the first commercial electric power plant in New York and the year Robert Ford assassinated Jesse James, a shower of frogs fell on Dubuque, Iowa. If that’s not freaky enough, they were frozen frogs! Frog hail. It pummeled horrified pedestrians and shattered like glass on streets and sidewalks. What may sound like a biblical plague was probably the result of a nearby waterspout slurping up the contents of a pond, containing, among other things, frogs and dropping it as the wind died down.
Biblical plagues hit ancient Egypt hard including boils, frogs, locusts and, of course, hail. As the Israelites fled slavery in Egypt, they ran out of food. Moses promised them “bread from Heaven”. What they got was “manna”. There is some question about what manna was and where it came from. Did it fall from the sky? Was it seed pods or insect spit? It’s like sausage. It’s best not to ask what’s in it.
In 1940, incredulous residents of the little village of Drosmieshchora, Russia were showered with a fortune in 16th century coins. Evidently, a tornado had dug up the buried treasure and distributed it among the humble villagers.
In 2018, nine tons of gold bars fell on Siberia from a cargo plane. Authorities recovered about 3.7 tons of the gold. The rest was…manna from heaven.