It was between North White Plains and Valhalla when the heavens opened up and the aerial attack commenced.

It was a hailstorm, and a freakish one at that–the icy missives pelting the train’s metal roof with a resounding tikk tikk tikk.

It was, as CBS2 news guy Lou Young later described it, “sustained pounding from the air,” like London circa 1940.

The commuters, who thought they’d seen/heard everything, scrambled to the window and looked out in amazement. “Holy shit! Holy shit!” the 30something lady next to me kept repeating. People shot photos out the window. Some recorded the audio.

It was an event, a one-sided vertical snowball fight with God himself. The commuters wanted to share it with loved ones. They dialed their cells and called the wifey/hubby at home, as if their domestic counterparts hadn’t noticed the chunks of ice falling all around them. “Look out the window!” they said. “Hail the size of golf balls.”

Hail, perhaps the least welcoming of all weather, oddly makes people think of golf. I heard three or four mentions of hail “the size of golf balls” on the train, and have heard it a few dozen more times on the TV news.

“One man’s lawn looks like the wrong end of a driving range,” enthused Lou Young in the late news.

(AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Mike Pigott was more measured in today’s Journal News, describing the hail as “quarter-sized.”)

Six minutes later, we pulled into Hawthorne. The hail had stopped, but the rain was lashing down like a broken levee. The commuters huddled under the stairs overpass, looking for a break in the storm.

I got to talking to my neighbor across the street, and a guy I hadn’t met before. He said he caddied in Mamaroneck. He was talking excitedly about the hail.

“It was…triple the size…of…”

Yup, here it comes, I thought. Tee it up.

“Golf balls!” he finished.

“I mean,” he added, “marbles.”

The rains showed no signs of subsiding. We chatted about the upcoming block party we would all attend, and what magic elixirs we would bring.

Twenty minutes later, there was no sign of lessened rain. The man said he was making a break for his car. He offered to drive me home–a kind gesture from a man who’d never met me before–and even offered to pick me up at the station’s overhang, after he’d driven his car out of the Broadway lot, which was half under water at this point.

Turns out my new caddy buddy drove me and my neighbor to her car, and she drove me home.

I got soaked to the skin running the 40 feet from her car to my house. When I walked in, the kids spoke excitedly of the storm. The Missus said she’d dropped her camera on the patio after hearing a thunderclap so loud it sent a shockwave through her body.

Little G held a hailstone before eating it.

I changed and sat for dinner and watched the rain pour down. For a brief spell, it turned back to hail, stones the size of…no, not that…pebbles dotting the picnic table.

I looked forward to tipping a few with my new caddy friend at the block party in 19 days, enjoying a sunny day, discussing golf–and that freaky storm we experienced on the first day of August.

[image: 9A in Elmsford under water, Journal News]