GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — The howling wind woke David "Macoontz" Davis up at 4 a.m. Thursday morning.
“It was pretty scary," he recalled. “I thought I heard a bang, but I wasn't sure, and what actually woke me up was my children. I could hear them running from the back of the house to the front of the house where I have my bedroom, and I got to the dining room and they were both standing there and they said, 'Did you hear that dad?' And I said, 'Yeah, I heard something.' And they said, 'It shook the house.’”
Before he even thought about any damage, he wanted to make sure his three kids were okay.
“I grabbed all my kids and I hugged them and made sure all of them were safe," said David. "Because I was coming out of a slumber I didn't realize if I was dreaming or not.”
Davis is trying to stay optimistic, after losing his wife to COVID just last month, drawing his strength from his Anishinaabe spirituality.
“All I can do is try to be that loon on the surface and stay calm, and that's how I teach my kids," he said. "With all this craziness and chaos, we got to be those little loons and go across that water, pristine like nothing is bothering us, even though underneath our legs are kicking.”
On the other side of town, Crystal Backhaus will never forget the sound she heard this morning, she said.
“I was awake, and I was actually in the shower getting ready for work," said Backhaus. "And as I was getting on the shower, I could just hear the cracking I'm like, 'It's that branch.'”
She wasn’t entirely shocked when she saw a branch poking through her back hallway ceiling.
“We have been keep an eye on this tree," said Backhaus. "We just thought we would hold off till spring we want to get it down.”
Backhaus's dad almost immediately rushed over to help her and her boyfriend patch up the roof this morning.
"The insurance company asked me, 'Well, is it still livable?' When you think about that, yeah, I can still live in it, you know," she said. "I'm not displaced or anything. That is a positive.”
