Outside The Box

You can’t give firewood away in eastern Towns County right now. Just about everyone we know has a storm story — a tree down, or a mess of leaves and limbs to clean up. As the storms approached, I watched the red boxes on the radar marching south Tuesday night. We put the rain gear, boots, and flashlights by the door.

The weather celebrities like to name every clap of thunder now, but if your backyard looks like ours, you might as well call that storm Sherman for its destructive power. Wednesday morning, it took a moment for the scene to register, because I’ve pictured it in my mind’s eye so many times: a hole in the sky where a tortured oak used to stand, and a wall of green and gray where the backyard pool once was. The pool is still there, technically — just not in any recognizable form.

That tree, thank God, never threatened the house. The ones that did were removed long ago. But this one was a problem child. It gripped a rocky incline. It grew tall reaching for the light, with outrageously long branches at odd angles reaching for more. It couldn’t be dropped without destroying the pool, Tracey’s prize dogwood, or my beloved sourwood. I didn’t want to climb it. The tree man we hired didn’t want to climb it. You couldn’t get a bucket truck anywhere near it. So we waited for nature to decide and hoped for the best.

A destroyed pool and a major cleanup project might not seem like the “best” at first glance, but I’ve learned to keep looking. The fractured stump told a story. The tree didn’t uproot. Only an oak could have supported so much weight with so little wood at the base. The missing wood had been replaced by sawdust — the product of years of housekeeping by ants. The collapse was inevitable. That hollow trunk filled with sawdust brought to mind a few large cities in the news, as well as a dozen empires long gone. When a tree is rotten at the core, it can be sustained by the good wood for a long time — until the weight becomes unbearable.

We’ll miss the lap pool. I prefer swimming to all other athletic endeavors because it’s exercise you can do while lying down. But we never filled the pool this year. There have been plenty of other opportunities to wrestle with gravity, and no shortage of exercise.

The fall of the tree revealed another danger. When it pushed the pool deck off its supports, it uncovered a large and aggressive yellow jacket nest hidden underneath — and Tracey is allergic. Dangerous tree down. Hidden danger revealed. Tracey’s dogwood and my sourwood unscathed. The “best” was looking even better.

But oh, the poor blueberry bushes… except that we had already planned a major pruning of the 30‑year‑old shrubs this winter, and the tree has done half the work for us.

And the cleanup? Well, here in this valley we’re not so pixelated that the need for physical labor is seen as a disaster. Inside that backyard mess is firewood, good oak lumber, a mass of wood chips for the blueberries and raised beds, and one more season without paying for a gym membership to drive somewhere and sweat where someone else has sweated. Feel like doing some aerobics with weights? I’ve got a wheelbarrow with your name on it.

Yes, it pays to keep your chainsaw sharpened around here. And the chainsaw is an exercise in mindfulness, especially with a storm‑damaged tree. A tree that grows wonky lands wonky. There are numerous potential bind points that make for structural instability and, if you like physics, stored‑energy failure. Cut the wrong limb at the wrong time and it can snap back with deadly force. Is that branch load‑bearing? Top bind, bottom bind, side bind, or pivot point? If I cut there, will it roll down on top of me or roll up under me? Think of it as a game of Jenga with log‑sized pieces. And who doesn’t benefit from exercise and mindfulness?

So we’ll clean it up. We’ll stack the wood, mulch the chips, prune the blueberries, and rebuild what needs rebuilding. Around here, that’s just life. Storm comes, storm goes, and you get back to work. Besides, if nature insists on giving me a gym membership I don’t have to pay for, I’m not going to argue. I’ll just grab the chainsaw and call it cardio.

In the end, storms don’t just rearrange the landscape — they rearrange our perspective. What looks like loss at first glance often turns out to be clearing, pruning, revealing. Sometimes the storm does the work we were avoiding. Sometimes it shows us what was already broken. And beyond that, every storm we weather is a reminder: the first disaster is the headline, and often the headline is more damaging than the storm. For anyone who emerges from that headline alive and intact, how we think and how we act is the difference between catastrophe and opportunity.