Modified from an email I wrote to my high school friend, Richard, back in December:
It’s late December, Annie and I head to bed at the usual midnight hour and I fall asleep shortly after. Now, some nights I sleep more lightly than others, prone to a kind of twilight slumber, when I cycle into dreams then to the edge of wakefulness. It was in one of those lighter phases that I heard a complex set of thumps. I know that twigs and smallish branches hit our roof routinely, especially in and around storms, one of which is just tapering off that night. It doesn’t take a large chunk falling to make a worrying sound, as the roof structure acts like a drum, amplifying the impact. So I’ve learned not to get too excited about it and I right now I just want to drift back to sleep. But these sounds are louder than the usual, and given this was on the heels of having both of our parked cars slammed by a drunkard — in front of our house — a couple of weeks prior, let’s just say I am jumpy about strange, percussive noises. Lord, do I have to get up? I rise from bed, noting that my electric alarm clock is off. Well, damn, did a tree go down on a local power line? We have at least three power outages each winter and just got over one.
I drop into my sweat-pants, wrap on my robe, then grab my headlamp to check out the house. I step into the porch room to open the front door, but it only opens a crack. There are branches on the front deck, learning on the door. I force them aside, just enough to slip out. A soft rain falls and there is no wind. But there is all this foliage where none should be. I look up to see the trunk of a two and half foot wide, eighty or so foot long tree looming over our house about 15 feet from the roof peak. It is angled upward from across the road where it was rooted, with its middle section suspended upon a cable wire that is attached to a telephone pole in front of our house. On its way down the tree had slammed into the cable, while a section had broken off to block the front door.
I go back into the house, wondering whether or not to wake Annie, but close the door to the bedroom to allow her to sleep as long as possible. She’s been having complicated problems the past few days, and had trouble sleeping, but that’s another story. I go into “Dad” mode to get things done. I grab my watch to note that it is 1:40 am, then call 911 on our landline. I scramble my description of the situation somewhat, stuttering a bit — adrenaline and sleepiness are a bad mix — and the operator wants more information than I have so she can send the right sort of help. Do I need an ambulance, the police, the fire department, highway utility crew, an electrical utility crew? I think, why would I know? After I tell her what I do know and hang up, I look out the back window near the phone table and, oh, there seems to be more debris outside on the deck. I walk out the back door to find a mess of leaves, branches thick and thin, holes in the deck-boards, and a broken railing. I sweep my headlamp back at the house and find much of the gutter torn off and the galvanized metal drip-strips dangling from the roof’s edge. I have a hard time believing this is real.
I keep a ladder on the back deck in winter, tucked into the inside corner of our L-fshaped house for roof access. Worried about the state of the roof, I climb carefully up and find another mess of tree limbs, but only one flat roof-vent dented and a section of metal chimney knocked askew. But no apparent roof punctures! Standing on the roof peak and looking up at the part of the tree looming over me, it dawns on me that when the tree slammed against the power and cable lines, its upper section had snapped off and fragmented, some of it blocking the front door, some of it skittering across the roof, but the mass of it hammering and impaling the back deck. I drag a few medium-sized branches across the roof and sling them over the twenty-foot drop behind the house. I’m stepping lightly so as not to awaken my wife, who is asleep in the bedroom below.
I go back out front to wait for official responses and wonder — with a knot in my stomach — just how strongly that cable is attached to that telephone pole. If the bulk of the trunk pushes past the cable, it will slice through the roof or deeper into the house. Is it safer to wake Annie? The trunk looks stable… Around forty minutes after calling 911, I see headlights southward, around the bend down the road, and hear utility truck radio gear. The truck is apparently stopped. Though I was the first to call in the emergency, it takes awhile for anyone to show at my house. I guess they are methodically checking for downed lines and trees. Meanwhile, I fret about the trunk leaning over my house. I don’t have a gas powered chainsaw. And I would not know how to approach cutting the tree while avoiding more house damage. Besides, when power lines are involved, you damned well better know what you are doing.
I walk out to our cars, which are parked in the turnout parallel to the road, to find a telephone line lying along their roofs. When powered, it would carry only small DC voltages and it is well insulated, so I pull it onto the road.
Wanting to do something other than wait, I go again to the back of the house and up to the roof to check more closely for damage. I hear voices out front and clamber back down to the broken deck, working past the debris and wonky boards, down the side steps, out to the road where I am met by three young men from the local Boulder Creek fire department. I tell them what I know and they insist on circumnavigating the property, looking for fire and other hazards. They are pleasant, relaxed and act as if these were everyday events. We chat while I show therm around, including the roof. Through all this, my wife remains asleep! They find none of the immediate hazards they might be involved with, so they leave to check our neighbor’s property.
An electrical utility cherry-picker truck pulls up in front of the house and the driver is checking over the electrical lines. After awhile, he continues on up the road, and as I learn later, all the way to the shut-off junction at the next cross street, Fallen Leaf, a half-mile away. Meanwhile a California Department of Transportation truck arrives and the driver starts pulling debris from the road. Clearing a path for emergency vehicles, he says, and continues up the road. He returns about an hour later with a chainsaw and approaches the fallen tree. Finally, someone I can ask about the strength of the cable line protecting my house. Oh no, it’s very tough, he says, he has seen this many times. The knot in my gut relaxes. I am too tired to watch him work on the tree, but I know these guys are competent, so I go back inside, sit in the easy chair to hold vigil until the entire thing is cut. I go back to bed around 5 am.
Annie sleeps through the whole thing.
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Oh, and Merry Christmas!
