It was a dark and stormy night… (No really, it actually
was.) Chester and I had been cooped up in the house most of the afternoon, so
we decided to go out for dinner. By the time we finished dinner and stopped for
some frozen yogurt on the way home, it was, as weather reports predicted,
getting very windy. We dodged a number of tree branches that had already fallen
in the streets. As we rounded the corner toward our house we were rocking out
(appropriately) to “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions. I was telling
Chester that my dance team did our competition routine to the song when I was a
freshman in high school. He was hanging on every word as I told him how cool we
were for performing to the Scorpions while all the other teams selected upbeat,
squeaky-clean, pop songs and oldies. (Actually I don’t think he was listening
to me at all and, if he was, he probably didn’t believe the part about how cool
we were. He did like the song though, so that was encouraging.)
We started to make the turn into our driveway and
immediately something did not compute. “Here I am, rock you like a hurr . . .
what the heck . . . ?!” There was a giant piece of plant life where there had
not been one before. Was it an enormous, spontaneous hedge? A spur-of-the-moment
shrubbery? No, neither of those options made sense. Pretty quickly my brain
turned off the Scorps and got down to the serious business of figuring out what
was going on in my yard. It was our tree – or at least a huge piece of it – fallen
across our front yard and into neighbor Carol’s driveway. I told Chester to
stay put, jumped out of the car, and rushed toward Carol’s house to make sure
her car was not squished under the tree. En route, I clothes-lined myself on
some sort of cable – one end was still attached to the corner of our roof; the
other end was pinned under the tree. (The good news is that Carol’s car was not.)
I froze. My parents instilled in me a very healthy respect
for electricity. By the time I was a toddler, I was pretty sure electrical
sockets were portals to all the evils of hell. Despite my fear of electricity,
I seem to always find myself tangling with it. Like the time our basement
flooded and I realized, as I was standing knee deep in sloshing water, watching
the freezer begin to float by, that it was still plugged in. My immediate reaction
was to jump aboard the floating freezer to get out of the water and reach for
the power cord to yank it out of the wall. I have no idea if this was the best
course of action, but it turned out alright. (The basement flooding was not
alright, but I did not end up getting electrocuted, so I’m counting it as an
ultimate win.)
This time I backed slowly away from the cord and noticed,
out of the corner of my eye, that another loose end was dangling in the street,
whipping in the wind. By this time Chester had gotten out of the car and
retreated to porch, where a large gust of wind lifted our scary, life-sized
Halloween skeleton out of the chair he was lounging on and sent him flying
through the air, boney arms outstretched toward Chester. “MOM!” Chester screamed.
A creepy black-feathered wreath flew off the door and a piece of fake bloodied
fabric sailed away to who knows where. Grave stones and gargoyles were
clattering down all over the place. A stick hit me in the face. Or maybe it was
a bone from our front yard graveyard. It was like Night of the Living Dead, Twister,
and Deadliest Catch all at the same.
From the relative safety of the house (I say relative
because we all know zombies and tornados will not be stopped by a 1925
craftsman), I decided my first order of business was… Wait. First of all, does
anyone care to venture a guess, at this point in the story whether Matt was
home for this apocalyptic evening or in some distant land? (Spoiler alert…. Not
home.) So… my first order of business was to call him in China or Dubai or
wherever the hell he was. I honestly don’t know. The relevant fact was that he
was not here and, I’m starting to suspect, doing this on purpose. It is common
knowledge that the list of domestic disasters for which Matt has conveniently
been halfway around the world is too long to detail here. In case you’re just
tuning in – broken hot water heater/flooded basement, broken furnace/coldest
week of the year, kaput sewer line/flooded bathroom, innumerable flat tires,
violent Chester puke-fests, mysterious Chester rashes, Chester head injuries
followed by all night visits to ER. You get the idea. In fact, it’s gotten so
bad that the day after Big Blow-pocalypse, our neighbor Randy decided we need a
block watch warning for whenever Matt is traveling. Some sort of alarm that
sounds and sends each resident a text message that includes a little “danger”
emoticon and says, “Batten down the hatches everyone! Matt is out of the
country!”
So anyway, I called Matt. (I like the way he can tell now,
just by the way I say his name when he answers the phone, that something is
wrong.) Between my describing the scene to him, neighbor Carol’s son coming
home and giving the cable a few ill-advised yanks to hold it up to his face in
the dark, and Chester realizing that his iPad didn’t have a connection, we determined
that it was not a live power line, but the cable line. So that was good. (Unless
you’re Chester. He feels that being deprived of an internet connection is akin
to a heinous form of torture.)
And so, since there was nothing more to do until morning, I
began the saga of calling Comcast to report the snapped cable line and ensuing
outage. The nice customer service man kept me on hold for 45 minutes “running
diagnostics.” Now I’m no cable genius, but I’m pretty sure I had accurately
diagnosed the problem. I kept trying to explain … “No, wait… I don’t need
diagnostics… I know what’s wrong! No… wait… there’s a giant tree down in my front
yard. Yes, a tree... It’s on top of the cable. The other end is dangling in the
street.” Just about the time I was sure I was getting through to him, he’d ask questions
about my equipment, whether or not things were turned on, and then kindly say,
“Ma’am I’m just finishing up some additional diagnostics, please hold.” Finally
they were able to “diagnose” that I needed a service guy to come to the house. Brilliant.
After the wind, and tree drama, and flying skeletons (not to
mention, worst of all, a night with no Netflix), Chester was scared to death and
insisted on sleeping with me. Between his version of sleeping, which feels more
like a mixed martial arts brawl than it does sleeping, worrying about what else
was going to come down in the continued howling wind, and trying to figure out
what to do about the tree in the morning, I didn’t sleep much.
Sunday morning dawned, still somewhat drizzly, but no more
wind. After filling up on coffee, feeding Chester breakfast, and setting him up
with an old school DVD (Oh the horror!), I bundled up and headed outside, convinced
that my Southern Oregon roots would serve me well. After all, I spent my entire
childhood playing in forests while my dad cut firewood, and traipsing around
our wooded property while he cleared and burned brush. “I can do this!” I told
myself. Granted, I’m somewhat scarred given that these childhood scenarios
nearly always ended with vast quantities of blood and trips to the ER. My dad
was either chain-sawing his knee-cap, or nearly setting himself on fire, or
impaling his leg on a pitchfork. No matter; I wasn’t going to be using a
chainsaw or a pitchfork – I was safe! (In fact, I don’t own a chainsaw, but I
will admit that when I went to the hardware store to obtain more yard waste
bags, I ventured down the chainsaw aisle and gazed longingly like it was a wall
of Louboutins.)
I rummaged around in the garage, came up with a handsaw and
some heavy duty clippers, and set to work lumberjacking the hell out of that
tree! I sawed; I clipped; I ripped; I pulled; I stuffed bags and bags and bags
of yard waste. I felt like Paul Bunyan, minus Babe the Blue Ox. About seven
hours after I started, with nothing more than my handsaw and clippers, the tree
was gone, except for a seven or eight foot section of trunk. My neighbor and
his friend came over with a little electric chainsaw (it didn’t look nearly as
dangerous as my dad’s giant ones, but I still stayed clear) and reduced what
was left to a pile of firewood-sized logs. I filled our big yard waste
container, our neighbor’s yard waste container, two additional standard garbage
barrels, and something like 17 or 18 yard waste bags.
By the end of the day, I could barely move. Everything hurt
– my back, my legs, my arms, and especially my hands and wrists. I have a split
in my thumb and my hands are still too sore to grip anything very tightly, but
I didn’t clip any fingers off or saw into any portion of my body. And given
that likelihood is definitely in my genes, I’m counting this as another win.
The yard waste guys came Monday morning and hauled
everything but the chopped up logs away. They said they can take those next
week if I tie them together in small bundles. I’m hoping if I put a “Free
firewood” sign on the pile, someone will take them off my hands before then. In
the meantime, I’m listening to the cable guy working away on the porch, nursing
my aching body, and dreaming of chainsaws and designer heels, in that order amazingly.
