It was a dark and stormy night (298/365/2023)

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We had family over for dinner last night, and then played some games for a couple of hours, before saying goodnight and goodbye as they were scheduled for a flight back to the other side of the country in the morning. we settled into the couch intending to finish a glass of wine and then call it a night.

The wind was gusting and the vegetation was bending wildly with the force.

Too wildly.

Although we took down the two most dangerous trees on our property some years ago, and our neighbours each also took one or two down, though not as large as the ones we had felled, there are still a number of really large cedar trees across our shared property. Some of those were topped decades ago and have 40-70 foot tall multiple trunk crowns. They’ve taken a lot of force over the years, but last night was a bit too much for two out front, that stand in a cluster of 5 or 6. One sits on the edge of driveway and straddles the line between our two units, the other was in the middle of the yard next door. Those two each let go of one of the split trunks, shearing off and crashing down.

The sound was thunderous, and a lot of thumps, rattles, and smashes accompanied the crash.

We grabbed our coats and shoes and went outside to see what had happened, knowing full well it had something to do with a tree….but which and where. Our driveway was obscured by huge branches, the phone and cable lines were lower than they should have been, and a line was broken and dangling in the middle of the roadway. Flashlights revealed two large broken trunks, one sticking out over our driveway from above, the other more difficult to see in the gloom.

I went upstairs to the bedroom to see what could be seen from the deck above the garage. The deck itself was covered with large branches, some broken and scattered, some still attached to the trunk that had skimmed our shared brick wall and landed on our neighbours, newly repaired, roof. Last fall a tree had come down from the other side of his property and smashed the corner of the roofline overhanging his courtyard. These two landed squarely over living space and broke the roof in a new place. And it was just recently that he’d managed to get the insurance company to cover it and had it all fixed. Heartbreaking.

Also on the deck was a tall aluminum ladder that usually hangs by hooks from the roof and lays flat against the brick wall, for roof access to check and clear roof drains. That was laying at an angle across the deck and I am amazed that it somehow didn’t smash any windows. And there was a large chunk of concrete also laying on the deck, a broken corner of the cap on our neighbours chimney.

But probably the most amazing thing was the truck. We don’t have a carport, and the garage houses the motorcycles, so the truck sits exposed, nose to the garage by the front door.

In the photo below, you can barely see the truck, it’s under all of that mess.

When the closer trunk sheared off it shaved all the branches along a length of the next large tree, and those branches all came down onto the phone and cable lines that stretch from the other side of the road down the length of our driveway, where they attach to our brick wall and then fan out to the four units. Our truck was underneath it all. And, in the darkness, it seemed like it was largely unscathed. I pulled it forward so the bumper was almost touching the garage door in an attempt to give it a little bit more room should anything else come down. When daylight finally arrived and we could look things over a bit closer it looked like the truck might be ok, but the place was a mess. I cancelled a couple of morning meetings since I had no internet and our cell service is unreliable at the best of times.

Kirk was trying to call Telus to get them out since we’d lost our line and had no internet, and I went out to the shed and found a saw and grabbed my big branch cutters. I looked over the branches twisted together and draped over the lines above the truck and started to poke, prods and tug a bit to see what I could do to maybe get the truck out from underneath the mess.

It was like an upside down game of Jenga. I sawed a piece here, cut a branch there, pulled bits and pieces off the lines, trying to keep it balanced as I did so, and trying to not do anything that might break the lines and bring it all down on myself and the truck. Eventually I cleared a bit of a tunnel and managed to squeeze the truck out and put it on the street. It was completely covered in cedar debris, but a walk around left me speechless, it seemed miraculously untouched. Kirk later cleaned it completely off and it came out unscathed. My truck has great juju, although someone later int he day said it had nine lives….which means that it is running out of lives, because this is the third time trees have almost landed on it, and it’s definitely had some other close calls. So while I was thinking it seemed like a really safe place to be, when put that way, maybe it’s becoming less so. 😉

Kirk was on never-never hold, and I had nothing else that I could really do to contribute, so I sent a sad email to our neighbour who has been at his significant other’s out in Cloverdale as she recovers from cancer treatments. What a shit year he’s had, and then I packed up my laptop and walked down to the office at the hatchery. Someone down there had sent an email out earlier so I guessed they still had internet, unlike us, and I had a few more meetings today that I needed to attend, one of them specific to that hatchery so it seemed like the best place to head for the afternoon.

When I got there, two or three of the staff stopped me and commented that their drive to work was obstructed today because Edgemont was closed off….and that there was equipment that looked like it was at our place. I confirmed that it was. One quipped that it was very inconsiderate of me to have interrupted his commute and made him double back around a different road. Ha!

There was surprisingly little down in the canyon on my walk dow to the hatchery. Lots of little stuff, and a couple of trees down across the river between the bridge and the fishway, and a couple of others, but a lot less than I expected.

We still have no phone or internet, maybe tomorrow Telus will get to us, but the cell phone hotspot more or less worked to write this post, and it’s amazing that we never lost power for more than about a minute a couple of hours before everything came crashing down. There were branches across the power lines, but they never gave way.

No one was hurt, the truck survived, our roof was spared, though the neighbouring unit was not. But no one was hurt, and that’s what matters most.

And that’s the kind of day it was.