One January dawn after a night of freezing rain, a huge crack whipped against our upstairs roof. The backyard view from my window revealed our near-by mature maple’s branches split at the top, and dangling from the heavy volume of ice. In minutes I discovered similar damage and precarious situations all up and down the street. The first signal of the terrible impact on the trees of l998's storm, was spreading its own dark limbs over us. Old allies from nature were drafted by their own attackers to perpetrate (and perpetuate) risk to humans, buildings, vehicles, and animals. In this holocaust they played a chilling role.

Fear took occupation of the neighborhood, and as I would soon learn rural properties, communities, small towns, city streets all across the affected central northeastern strips of North America. An unheard of dread in walking by or standing beneath limbs of the trees, betwitched with an eerie beauty, as well as hydro wires and telephone posts. Reluctant witnessing of any swaying or bobbing of branches. The oak-laden street behind ours, usually an envied location by the residents of this community for that reason, was soon police-taped closed, the fallen or split monuments, eradicating electrical power and trapping the neighbors. With help, they evacuated in the next days, many re-stationed for two weeks. Pedestrians and motorists if they must negotiate roads and sidewalks outside, struggled to create or find paths not beneath the prospective objects of doom.
A grip of silence of man's machinery, assumed the cold air and left us listening cautiously to the winds and the branches.
The immediate human vulnerability obliterated any arborist sympathy for the plight of the trees at this point. For one of the few times in my life, I knew them to be turncoat towers, holding us hostage, even if involuntarily malicious. For they were sufferers as well. Creaks, whistles of wind and shivers of ice on black bark, and black power lines, added backdrop to newsstories, from battery-operated radios, of deaths and tragedies. A sense of impotence prevailed.

Long after the crisis ended and the scarred land and its people experienced restoration, one single branch still hung suspended upside down on our treetop until finally removed. Across the Ottawa Valley such intriguing reminders still appear, as if pointed fingers reminding us of the lessons and the time of the breach of trust in nature.

12/06/2004

Posted on 12/06/2004
Copyright © 2025 Maureen Glaude