Catastrophe Sculpture (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the long story that I started yesterday. You can start at the beginning here if you like.

As my neighbor’s car sped away in the storm and I jolted into action, I started formulating plans. I grabbed my son and we sprinted to the master bedroom. My whirling brain was thinking, predicting, deciding…what are the angles, where will it fall, what should we move? I set Miles to grabbing all the blankets and pillows from our room and moving them to his, which is the very back of the house, and thus farthest from the tree. I realized that a heavy tree would likely come through the roof, so I rapidly started flinging a towering stack of brand new books and about $1000 worth of yarn in knitting projects in progress out of our room and into Miles’. Midway through this, Miles realized that we would be much safer down in the basement. That would be much further from the tree, especially as we could still stay in the back of the house. He was absolutely right, so I grabbed the piles of blankets that he had made, and he grabbed the pillows and we ran down the stairs. We made a couple more trips to lay in supplies. He lured all three cats downstairs and remembered to bring food and water dishes and their cat food, and then flashlights. I sprinted back upstairs for extra batteries, and maybe some candles and matches, with a sense that grabbing the medications should be next. The wind still screamed and the house creaked. It wouldn’t be long.

At that moment, Erich exploded back into the house. “It’s going to come down!” he yelled. “Maybe five minutes, maybe ten! Stand here at the window and don’t take your eyes off of that tree.” Miles came upstairs to help and was shouted back downstairs to safety. Erich ran to the bedroom closet and was trying to throw some clothes together so we could get out. I watched the tree from the front windows. Heart in my throat, I kept seeing the wind slam itself into the top of the tree and it would l-e-a-n toward us. Then the wind would regroup to take another breath and heave more gusts and the tree would straighten back up. Miles was crying and kept trying to leave the basement to help, to be with his security parent (me), and to catch the cats, who had also come looking for their security parent (still me). In terror, I locked my eyes on the tree as it leaned and paused, and leaned and paused again. Without turning my head, I also shouted at Miles to get back down the stairs where he would be safe. I told him that we would be there soon, but he could NOT. COME. UPSTAIRS. How long does it take a tree to fall? I had a clear line to the back of the house, but could I spin and run fast enough to get to safety before it hit us? I was limping and using my cane. Was I about to die?

Then all at once, it came. Another gust billowed across the neighborhood and the tree leaned and leaned and picked up speed. Not stopping this time. “It’s coming!!!” I screamed as I whirled away from the windows and ran. I was halfway through the kitchen on the way to the basement, my frightened son’s white face peering up at me from halfway down the stairs, when the impact hit. The floors jumped. The windows rattled. There was a huge flash of light from behind me, followed by an explosion and the sound of showers of sparks. The lights flashed out, and the furnace abruptly stopped, along with all other sounds, just for a moment.

The tree had missed the roof.

Erich sent us back downstairs until we could figure out what was going on outside. Clearly, the power lines were down and we needed to make sure that nothing caught on fire. He slipped outside again to reconnoiter with the neighbor and to eye the other two massive fir trees on our block. A moment later, he opened the front door and yelled that we must not come outside. There were power lines down all over our yard, our driveway, and our house. We could not get out. We needed to call the fire department.

I called 911 on my cell from the basement. The dispatcher advised us to stay in the basement, checked twice to see if anyone was hurt, and reiterated that no one should attempt to cross our property or try to exit the house at all until the fire department came and evaluated the situation and directed us to a safe route out. Trees and power lines were going down everywhere, she told me, and people were calling in dangers from all over, but she would try to escalate our call because there were people trapped in the house. Even so, it could be an hour or two.

Surprisingly, the fire department arrived very quickly. Maybe 30 minutes? Maybe 15? It is hard to judge when you are hiding in the basement, heart pounding, listening to the howling wind still roaring its destruction. The temperature was dropping quickly. It had been 13 degrees before the power went out. Our house is 108 years old and drafty as anything. I started to worry how long it would be before we froze. The three cats are furry, sure, but they are also small animals. How quickly would they lose their body heat? Miles is 13, skinny as a rake and only weighs 73 pounds. He is cold half the time in the summer. He could not endure a long stretch without heat either. I had already put on a second pair of socks and could still feel my feet numbing in the cold. Did we even have enough blankets to keep us warm in this storm?

The fire department confirmed that we could not move our cars. The top portion of the tree blocked most of the driveway, and it was festooned with wires tangled throughout the branches. The only open part of the driveway had myriad snapped and loose wires blowing back and forth. There would be no way we could get a car backed out without hitting the wires and running the risk of electrocution.

No thanks.

The firefighters told us that it was likely that the wires were dead right then and did not have power running through them, but that you treat them as live wires regardless. The only safe exit was to leave through the back sliding glass down, cross to the end of the deck, climb down, cross the raised beds, kick down the fence between us and the neighbor, climb over the low chicken wire fence on her side, walk through her yard, down the far side of the street, and out. The snow was coming down harder and harder. Apparently, my neighborhood got 8″ that day, even though it kept blowing away. Darkness was closing in, and the wind, well, the wind still never let up.

Mind you, this tree had not fallen from directly across the street. It fell from the far side of the yard of the house across the street and over one. It fell across their yard, across the sidewalk, across the entire road, across our neighbor’s front garden, across our front garden, across the sidewalk, across our entire front yard, and across the driveway on the far side of the house. It obliterated our 40′ tall ginkgo tree, our Christmas decorations in the yard, tore our higher-than-the-roofline crepe myrtle in half, and crashed across the driveway. Out the front windows, we could mostly see a wall of branches, six feet or higher from the trunk of the tree – and that was the very TOP of this tree. In the neighbor’s yard, the roots of the tree extended out approximately 12 feet on either side of the trunk, and the half of the branches that were pointing upwards reached nearly to their roof. Everything was tangled in wires. Power lines, telephone lines, cable wires, and fiber optic lines on both sides of the street for half of the block were down. Power was out everywhere. No one could drive on the street or walk through the yards or on the sidewalks. We were so buried in branches that I could not see the fire engine right outside. The firefighters blocked everything off with yellow caution tape and barricaded either end of the street with sawhorses equipped with flashing lights. It is a very strange feeling to watch your house be wreathed in caution tape while you are inside of it. It was surreal.

We now had survived the impact, and though we were worried that the tree from the next house over would also come down, we were a bit farther away from that one. We had a moment to gather together and think. There was no question that we needed to find a place to stay, and it had to be someplace that we could take all three cats. We needed to get somebody to pick us up in a huge windstorm, with snow pouring down heavily and ice and snow accumulated on the roads. A storm in which officials were regularly repeating that everyone should stay inside. But, the heat was draining out of the house rapidly. We still had water and had been keeping the taps open so they did not freeze. However, we could not cook, as our oven is electric and the gas stove top has an electric spark instead of a pilot light. The same applies to the gas fireplace. So: no light, no heat, no way to cook. No transportation because we could not move our cars. The storm still had not peaked, and was not expected to peak until late afternoon on the next day. The power was not going to be restored any time soon. My husband called all of the cab companies in town. The first one laughed at him. The others did not even pick up the phone. What were we going to do?

To be continued (again) tomorrow.