Coming home and finding your house a smouldering wreckage, burned down to the foundation – that’s not what happened to me. For some reason, though, I dread it; it’s why I have a whole mental check-list I run through before I depart and arrive, walking down the list of systems that need to be turned off (or on) when I am home or away.
I landed at Washington, Dulles around 8:00pm last night and hit the road for the 3hr drive back up to the farm. So (allowing for bathroom and drink breaks) I got home around midnight, roared into the dark and dust called “my driveway” and up to the house, to be greeted by this:
One of the pine trees in front of the house managed to fall and more or less just miss my truck. It landed pretty much dead on the spot where I usually park my highway car (I have a winter/utility car, and a distance car). This is not what you want to come home to:
The tail-lights on the right of the picture are those of my Chevy Tahoe.
Amazingly, it did not appear to have hit any part of the car hard enough to do any damage. And it missed the porch roof, which is good. (To be fair, the trees are not allowed to grow tall/close enough to fall on the house. I’ve seen what that looks like.)
I figured that there must have been quite a blow. There were branches everywhere. These blew the 50 feet from the treeline to the roof and there were branches on the porch. It was fun coming home in pitch darkness and walking into pine branches, wondering if my house was OK. But there wasn’t much to do about it, and I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time doing damage assessment in the dark, so I went to bed and decided I’d start dealing with it in the morning. One of my first rules of crisis management is “if you can, sleep on it.”
I’m pulling forward the schedule for my annual spring gutter-cleaning; that stuff is going to jam up everything and then the gutters won’t redirect water away from the house properly.
It turns out I was pretty lucky – the branches just made some sap-marks down the side of my car but nothing heavy hit it. I usually park the Honda CR-V to the left of the Tahoe, i.e.: right where the tree landed.
In 1988 I was driving North on Baltimore’s Charles Street (just past Coldspring Lane) in my little Honda CRX, and I heard a weird sound and looked in the rear-view mirror and the road was gone. All there was, that I could see, was green. A huge oak tree had fallen right behind me. I was so mind-boggled by the whole thing that I slowed down but kept driving – what else was I to do? It wasn’t until I got a few miles further that I realized, from the timing, that the tree would have already been falling when I drove right out from under it. If I had been aware what was going on, I probably would have braked and that would have been the end of me! Then I pulled over and had a brief panic attack.
Close call! If our front pines ever go, the house is toast. Well, a good part of it anyway. Unusually, for all the windstorms bringing trees down lately, we’ve escaped here. For now.
One of my great-grandfathers died from a tree. A friend had bought a new car, a big deal, and invited my great-grans and their kids out for a drive (my grandfather and great uncles). Great Grandma & the kids were in the back, driver and great-grandad in the front. This was in SoCal, they were driving along, a sudden storm swept in. While they were stopped, a big damn tree toppled, right onto the car. Completely crushed the front end. Driver and great granddad dead, great grandma and the kids okay. Scary shit, no way to predict it.
Caine@#1:
Close call! If our front pines ever go, the house is toast.
When I was a kid a huge oak tree hit one of the neighbors’ houses and tore the entire corner off. It was pretty impressive damage (and tree)
While they were stopped, a big damn tree toppled, right onto the car. Completely crushed the front end. Driver and great granddad dead, great grandma and the kids okay. Scary shit, no way to predict it.
One thing I’ve learned from gaming: humans in today’s societies aren’t used to sudden threats from above, so we tend to be pretty easily surprised by stuff falling on us.
That must have been really traumatic for great grandma and the kids!
And wet wood is really heavy. Those oak rounds I use for my anvil stand weigh 300lb or so. A whole oak tree – that’s a lot of energy once it gets moving.
Huge relief it did not do any worse damage. Several years ago we got hit by a microburst, in the middle of the night during a windstorm. A really large tree came down on one of the barns and pens…. fortunately the animals managed to sort of arrange themselves in the holes between the branches and none got crushed or injured. Across the street a very large old ponderosa pine came down *right next* to their house, like this tree is next to the truck, scraping it but no doing too bad of damage. However, the next door neighbor was not so lucky and her ROOF blew off. And I don’t mean the shingles – the entire thing! You could stand in the living room and see the sun!! I guess it was an old double wide and they were fixing it up, so the roof had not become part of the house just yet, and they were very unlucky in the timing of that storm.
Also huge relief your house did not burn down. That is not a pretty sight, and unfortunately I have seen it happen to others.
By the way, see that curve at the end of the driveway, with the ditch and the little dip? That appears to have been scientifically engineered to collect snow. In the winter, snow from all the fields for miles around blows and collects at that elbow, until it’s about 4 feet deep. I keep trying to plant things along that edge, to hold the snow, but the rabbits and deer obliterate them.
You can also see the ‘garden oddity’ which is formerly a satellite dish that my friend Andrew and I decided to do something with. And the tremendously unsuccessful grape trellis. The poor grapevines try to push forth each year, only to be ruthlessly stumped by deer, beetles, and rabbits – all of whom are too stupid to wait for grapes (to fight over)!
kestrel@#3:
her ROOF blew off. And I don’t mean the shingles – the entire thing! You could stand in the living room and see the sun!!
Damn that must have been a shock. “Hey, your indoors? It’s now outdoors.”
Your garden oddity is similar to one in my parent’s old garden. In that case, the sides (which were plywood) had been put on sort of following the angle of the top, so that the base was much bigger around than the top. This made the doors open oddly and the whole thing looked really strange. We called it the Darth Vader Shed.
As far as planting something the deer won’t destroy… get in touch with the guy who planted this tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor:_The_Tree_of_Utah Granted, you’ll need way more than one. But the deer, rabbits and beetles won’t be able to kill them! And if they blow down in a windstorm, you could make swords out of it!
One day in winter some thirty years ago my parents went together to work at about 5:30 a.m. It was proper winter, with frost, snow and that night also wind howling, so they were all wrapped up. Suddenly my father started running any my mother tried to keep up with him. Fraction of a second later a huge cypress tree fell just behind them
My father has heard the trunk breaking and before he could consciously process what is happening, his flight reaction kicked in. My mother heard nothing over the wind, but she tried to keep up with him automatically, without thinking too.
Had he tried to stop and look what is happening, or discuss it with my mother in any way, I would become an orphan that night.
Had my mother paused for “WTF is he running suddenly” or asked or something similar, I would be half-an orphan at least.
Charly@#7:
Had he tried to stop and look what is happening, or discuss it with my mother in any way, I would become an orphan that night.
I am always amazed by such stories. Sometimes, we just do exactly the right thing and it’s as though our conscious mind steps out of the way and some survival subroutine kicks in, “I got this.”
Marchus@#4
Sorry for the thread necromancy. I thought you might want to know a trick I was told about when I was trying to find a way to keep deer away from my garden.
Get a bunch of cheap electric fence poles or similar and make the outline of a fence around what you want to protect, then string fishing line between the poles at a couple different heights. Best I can tell the deer bumps into the line but can’t see it and that freaks them out so they don’t simply jump over it as they do most fences. Doesn’t do anything for the damn rabbits and groundhogs though so, in your case, it might not help enough to keep something alive long enough to grow past the point of being in danger.