Dreams Looking West Part 2

We had one chore that needed attention in Sliammon that day and had driven the twenty kilometers from Lund and back awed by the intensity of the storm. I am not ordinarily afraid of storms but this one had an out of season temper that literally took your breathe away. We lost electricity within minutes of returning home around three p.m. With large areas of power outages already around us we knew there would be none through the night. Since the winds had started, litter in the form of seed cones and branches, up to the size of small trees had been peppering the house and landscape. Without the radio and other house noises provided by power, the background storm noise came into the foreground.

With what daylight we had left we prepared for the night. That done, we watched at the windows, shifting windows around the house in different directions to study different trees. It was fascinating in a horrible way to witness those mighty trees moved in ways I hope never to see again. At five, winds starting gusting harder, from 60 and 80 kilometers an hour to a hundred kilometers an hour and more. When the wind swung 180 degrees to come from the north it took every treetop and trunk, almost to the roots with it, starting all turning like swivel sticks in a coffee. With the wind shift, the volley of debris increased, as did the noise level. Instead of sounding like a heavy rain and wind storm, it sounded like we were sitting on a tarmac listening to unending jet airplanes taking off.

For the first few moments of new pitch in wind velocity it was a wonder that every tree in the woods wasn’t flying through the air. With darkness so close it was almost a relief to see a hundred and twenty foot long tree fall forty feet away from the house, onto the hydro lines. As the tree crown came down a root ball thirty feet across rose thirty feet into the air catching up and taking down a second smaller hemlock tree in the root mass. Debris rained from the surrounding trees. My eyes were so full with the mind boggling sight that my ears were no longer concerned with the sound, and my voice completely deserted me when I tried to call Courtney to come and look.

When we went to bed around ten the storm had abated slightly. Since watching that first tree come down we heard the explosive cracking sound of at least another dozen trees coming down. Going to bed wasn’t about sleeping so much as resting the body and catching cat naps between the blasts of wind and rain hitting the house. Morning was long in coming, and as is often the case in these situations, real sleep didn’t come until just before light.

What that light finally exposed was like a war zone. Everything was littered in green debris, everything. The end of our driveway, where it turns onto the road was covered with the mid section of a hundred and fifty foot Douglas fir.
As would be common for most of the 30,000 trees that fell across the affected area of B.C., the trees root ball had erupted out of the ground to loom twenty five feet into the air. There were six trees down all together on our property, and, like most of the trees across the province their crowns pointing to the northwest with gigantic black looming root balls in the southeast. The fir across the driveway counted 250 growth year rings, making it a seedling in 1750. Another fir close to the house was 200 years old.

The hundreds of years of growth rings on the trees tell a story about growing conditions through the years; the very tight difficult to count rings at the heartwood indicating crowded growing conditions and the wider rings indicating perfect growing years. A sense of the smallness of the doings of men comes to me when I meet old growth giants who were seedlings before white men found this part of North America.

A first chance to hike to a favorite stretch of old growth forest to a ridge top and viewpoint called Manzanita Bluffs came in the beginning of March 2007. Besides offering us a chance to see the dynamics of the storm played out on our hiking trail, I also found myself validating a feeling that has been creeping over me about the rightness of the storm. Everywhere the old growth trees were bowled over patches of light and space has opened. For all I cringed when the thousands of year’s worth of tree growth fell down in December, now in March it makes perfect sense that the smaller trees will quickly fill the newly vacated space.

I haven’t taken a picture of one of those root balls despite the fact that I feel the image represents the winter of 2006/07 as an icon. The largesse of the scene deserves respect and I haven’t found the right perspective yet as a photographer. The clean up from that one storm continues. While not many homes were damaged and there was no loss of life, I know because of how long it has taken me to process the event and write about it that a profound wordless change was wrought in my relationship with Mother Earth. It has taken six months for the writer in me to feel driven to begin the task of honoring the introspective lessons of the winter of 2006/07.