Here's another article by the same author. I really like his stuff.
Reporter's Notebook
Of Life and Limb: A Good Tree Gone Bad
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 20, 2003; Page C01
As we drove around in the storm Thursday night, taking the measure of Isabel, my friend Angus Yates was a bit worried that a giant tree might topple over and crush his house. He wanted to make sure he got back to the neighborhood before that happened.
He succeeded.
The trees on our street in Palisades are willow oaks. They're behemoths. Thomas Jefferson loved this type of tree, which has a perfect, cartoonish V-shape, the trunk rising for a couple of stories before splitting into multiple trunks that finally, high above the houses, open into broad canopies.
This tree has the astonishing ability to survive on a patch of urban turf not much larger than a beach towel. The tree in front of the Yates house extruded preposterously from the tiny rectangle of city property between the sidewalk and the curb. You'd look at it and think: Is that thing safe?
This is a part of town where most people have office jobs and have long since lost the ability to work a chain saw, much less (do they still make such things?) an ax. There was a time, long ago, when people understood that a tree was merely the temporary condition of lumber. A tree was the larval stage of a stump.
Now, we hug trees. Hardly anyone sees trees for what they are: an urban terror, intrinsically deceptive, seemingly inert, stately and well-grounded -- until that horrible moment when they decide to get funky with some gravity.
The tree in front of Angus and Sissy Yates's house is easily 75 years old, and neighborhood lore puts its planting at 1918. What's certain is that it's 121/2 feet in circumference. We measured it Friday morning at a point on the trunk three feet "off the ground," to use a term that by then had ceased to have a literal meaning.
When you live in the shadow of such a tree you have to tell yourself that it has a vast subterranean infrastructure, and that through some natural genetic gift it is designed to remain erect even in powerful storms. We take solace in the belief that there are secret systems and backup networks that protect us. Surely the tree had its act together.
Nonetheless no one parked a car on the street as Hurricane Isabel approached. A huge, diseased willow oak just down the street had fallen a few weeks earlier. No one completely trusted the trees. The prudent residents slept in rooms downstairs or away from the street. The rest of the Yates household -- Sissy and the three kids (Angus, Jack, Josie) -- did just that, camping out in the dining room. But Angus, an Emmy-award-winning film and television producer, has been known to court danger (he is always helicoptering through exotic places like New Zealand and Patagonia) and had already survived several hours driving through the storm and dodging road debris with his reporter buddy. At 1 in the morning he was upstairs in his bedroom reading a biography and keeping an eye on the old tree just out the window.
"It's doing the hula," he says, reconstructing the moment. "It's doing this unnatural rhythmic gyration. It's making that strainer sound, of wind blowing through fishing nets."
He closed the book and began to doze.
The wind intensified. The willow oaks rocked and thrashed. They were now fully mobile.
What no one knew at this point, but what would become apparent moments later, was that the mighty willow oak by the Yates home had a root system that you'd expect to find on an azalea. This thing was a 70-foot candle stuck in a birthday cake.
"I heard this enormous crack -- it sounded like someone taking a head of lettuce and twisting it."
He looked out the window and saw something that no sane human being ever wants to see: a homicidal oak coming right for him.
"I saw the whole thing coming into the window. That's when it gets reflexive. I don't know what propelled me out of bed. In midair I felt the spray of glass shards pepper my body."
The house broke the fall of the tree admirably, but a single branch, thick as an elephant's trunk, rammed through the window directly next to Angus's bed, protruding 55 inches into the room. It was as though it wanted to grab its victim and yank him outside.
Prone on the floor, waiting for the full impact of the giant tree, Angus thought, "This is it." The it that need not speak its name. The big one. The final and irremediable smushing.
[Hint to delicate readers who at this point in the narrative may be hyperventilating with fear that the protagonist will die. He doesn't! The tree, however, is not going to make it.]
So what is it like, we ask (sitting in his garage the next day, where he's working his cell phone and still trying to get the glass out of his back), when you have that "This is it" moment?
"You go from a full audit and appraisal of that instant -- this is all happening in milliseconds -- then that goes into a realization that you're going to die, and then the last thought is, 'I wonder what it's going to feel like.' "
And then he was alive, and thought of Sissy and the kids, and ran downstairs. "This is bad, the tree's come down on the house," he said, and they all took shelter in the rear garage.
But suddenly no place seemed safe.
The willow oaks were silhouetted against a sky glowing pale orange from the lights of Georgetown, each tree seemingly larger than ever, impossibly tall, and bucking madly -- monsters raging at the foolish and pathetic mortals who dared eke out a miserable existence at their ankles.
I ran over and we all dashed back to my house, and somehow through the miracle of youthful innocence the kids were soon asleep again.
Josie, the 3-year-old, briefly woke up, announced, "That was freaky," and went back to sleep.
The men with the chain saws were already on hand by yesterday afternoon. The sun came out. The sun had never shined much on the Yates yard, and the grass had always struggled to grow. At least, said Angus, this'll be good for the lawn.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
