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The Tree We Lost in the Storm


We heard the crack a little after 9PM on Monday. By then, Hurricane Sandy was raging, but so were we. I’d stocked up on beers as standard storm prep and we started drinking them even before the lights went out, around seven or so. Going out to look at it in the wind and the rain didn’t seem so outlandish. It seemed like fun. As I ran toward the back yard to see what fell with my flashlight, I was singing Clutch‘s “Big News II” out loud. “Can’t funk with the feel…”

The pine was one of several on the property that stand (or stood, in this one’s case) probably 100 feet tall. Something so ancient, your tendency is to think of it as an old man. For a moment, I called the remaining three the “three wise men,” but it seems inappropriate to credit man with this kind of wisdom. This one, upended root tangle alone stood almost a story in itself, with many of the roots thick enough on their own to be trees in another context. Because the trunk had split and then split again ages ago, it had a network of branches that my wife climbed as a child, and not last year I pushed my niece on a swing hung from one. It had four tops and that was apparently enough to catch the wind.

Nobody knew how old it was, basically because it was older than everything. The area started to be developed circa 1900 and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if that row of trees was there when they started laying foundations for the farmhouses that still remain today. In the pic below, you can see the remaining trees — one, two and then another one that appears shorter but is of a height and just on an angle — and if you click to enlarge, there’s the top of a house off to the bottom left. To give you some idea of the scale, that house has a full three stories.

Where it fell you could really only call convenient. The angle left it right between our neighbor’s standalone garage and his house. Only the very top brushed against the side of his house, and the next morning, when all that remained of the storm was the occasional spritz of water, a cool breeze and an odd sense of electric trauma in the air, John, who owns the house, was already out with a chainsaw, removing branches. He’ll have to get someone in for the trunk itself, or else just spend a year on it.

I worry for the other three trees. The one in the middle above lost part of its top in a bad snowstorm we had last October, but all of them had stood up to Irene last year, though I think that was a tropical storm by the time it hit New Jersey. Not only are they exposed to conditions they’ve never known before, but with one of them gone, the others will catch wind in different ways, be pushed in different angles, etc. Still, not like you can have them taken down. Even if the cost wasn’t prohibitive, they deserve to be there more than the house does. Any of the houses.

It’s a bummer to see, but you have to put it into perspective. I’m talking about the tree we lost in the storm. Not the house, not the person, not the car the tree fell on, or anything — and plenty of people didn’t get off so light. I’ll think of the yard as having a scar, and not just for the crater where the roots lifted up, but if it had to be life and limb, it could’ve been much, much worse.

To the best of my knowledge, we still don’t have power, cell service or running water. The Patient Mrs. and I let out for Connecticut late last night. After waiting an hour and a half on line to get gas at the Hess, we packed up and booked a room in New Britain, near enough to where her sister lives to go over there and do laundry today and in a hotel that takes pets so we wouldn’t have to leave the little dog Dio behind.

It also puts me in a better position to get to the Small Stone showcase in Boston this weekend, so all around it seemed the winning choice as much as there was one. When the lights and water come back on in the valley, we’ll have to flush all the toilets, clear out the fridge and freezer and pick up pieces of other trees, but that’ll just about be the end of it. We were lucky. If you were in the path, I hope you were too.

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One Response to “The Tree We Lost in the Storm”

  1. Jordi Castellà says:

    Good to know you’re all fine! Greetings!

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