March, Like a Lion
The wind started blowing around 10 a.m. Friday morning and picked up steadily throughout the day. I went into town to get a few last-minute items but made sure I was home by 3 p.m. when the High Wind Warning went into effect. I noticed that Friday’s warning was specific as to location, and that location included us. Our road runs north to south along the base of the mountains, and when we get these wind warnings, it is usually because a pressure gradient sets up over the Continental Divide and the winds come roaring down the backside of the mountains from east to west.
We’ve lived here for almost 27 years. We used to get maybe one or two of these windstorms a year. They would take out a couple of trees. Friday night’s storm was the fifth one since August and definitely the strongest one. We have lost so many trees that our neighborhood is starting to look like a meadow instead of a forest.
We lost power shortly after the local news ended at 5:30 p.m. The husband went out and fired up the generator, then went out to a call for some downed trees. I wasn’t crazy about going upstairs to sleep, so when he got back from the call, I stayed in the living room until 10:00 p.m. when we turned in for the night.
The builder of this house—who sleeps next to me every night—assured me that we were safe in bed. Just as I started to drift off, though, I heard things coming down outside. I got up and went to look out the bathroom window to make sure nothing had hit the chicken coop. We did not put any windows in the second floor gable end of our house, so I was limited to what I could see from the bathroom. The chicken coop looked intact. Just as I walked back into the bedroom, though, there came a crashing noise from the front yard. I put on my robe, went downstairs and stuffed my feet into my muck boots, and headed outside to see what had happened:
There is a concrete slab behind the old garage, between that garage and the house. Two 1000-gallon propane tanks sit on the slab, as well as a porta-potty. My kids hate that porta-potty. They were mortified when the husband bought it. It’s been there since they were in elementary school, although a year or two after we got it, the husband moved it to the concrete slab and built a nice wooden fence around the whole slab to hide it and the tanks.
The porta-potty is no more. The top of a very tall larch near the road had blown down and taken out the porta-potty, destroyed part of the fence, and shifted one of the propane tanks about 6”. The husband checked to make sure the fittings on the tanks were okay, got a bar and moved the one back into place, and pulled what debris he could out of the way. Keep in mind that the wind was still howling and we didn’t know what else was going to come down.
We came inside and I went back to bed. He went to sleep—briefly—in his recliner before the fire department got paged out for more downed trees. They were out most of the rest of the night.
It was almost 8:00 a.m. before we could assess all the damage, although he had walked the property with a flashlight to see what needed immediate attention. Interestingly, we did not have power but our rental house next door did, because of the location where the line had come down.
This is a view from our front yard looking into the woods on the south side of our property:
That woodpile is wood the husband cut up from the last batch of trees that fell.
We had trees down on the north side of our property:
And one that had fallen onto the corner of the new shop:
That tree was removed with the aid of the forklift.
I went out yesterday afternoon to survey the damage in the woods on the south side of the property. I estimate we lost 8-10 more trees out there, and all large ones, in addition to the ones that fell in earlier storms and haven’t yet been cut up:
Most came up by the roots:
But some sheared off about 20 feet up:
Elysian lost three large pines in her front yard and another several in the backyard. The front yard of her neighbor across the road took the worst of the damage—they had 30-40 pines in their yard and I would estimate that maybe a dozen thin ones are still standing.
The good news?
Nothing fell on the house, the greenhouse, the chicken coop, or the old garage, and the one tree that clipped the new shop did very minor damage.
We were able to keep the generator running and had power and heat.
We have enough firewood to last us a few decades, although not all of this burns well.
No one got hurt.
It’s open burning until the end of March, and that will speed up cleaning up the debris.
I am sad to lose so many trees. I like living in the woods. One of the other trees that came down in the front yard damaged a couple of my pear trees. Hopefully they will recover. The rest of the fruit trees were not damaged. The one bright spot yesterday was having the two little boys here in the afternoon so their mothers could get some work done. The two of them spread their collections of Matchbox cars out on the carpet and we watched construction videos on YouTube. The electric company had the power restored by late afternoon.
At some point, I’ll have to get some larch seedlings (the Forest Service used to sell them and may still do that) and repopulate our woods with trees.
The weather is supposed to be warm and sunny again by the middle of the week. Mother Nature is a fickle creature.
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Our big fire department auction that is always held the first weekend of April has been canceled because of the coronavirus epidemic. I know what a difficult decision that was to make—this would have been the 54th (!) consecutive auction—but public safety is paramount. I only wish that churches would be more proactive about canceling services and activities, especially because churches like ours are weighted heavily toward the elderly end of the population. We’ll see who comes to church this morning. I know some people are planning not to. The other church I play for very reluctantly canceled the rest of their mid-week Lenten services and has asked people to sit apart from each other in the pews.
So . . . we continue to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. The husband picked up six bags of potting soil for me last week. I’m going to mix in some aged manure and get seeds started this week. We’ve got some hens that are acting broody, so we’re letting them sit on eggs. Even as some activities come to a standstill, others are going full steam ahead.