flashquake Non-Fiction - The Broken Pine by Debi Orton

flashquake
The Broken Pine
by Debi Orton

When the sky became far darker than usual, I knew something extraordinary was about to happen. Then the sound began. It reminded me of a rapidly turning dynamo or a turbine, a deep throbbing hum. I watched a poorly defined column of swirling air carry bits of unidentifiable debris behind the hill opposite my house. After it departed, roofing tiles, insulation and sundry other construction materials drifted surreally down to my lawn in slow motion.

Tornados are rare in upstate New York, rarer still in Schaghticoke. Three years ago, on the last day of May, I watched one go past my house. I was home alone, outside on my front porch where I'd settled in to watch the thunderstorm blow through. There were tornado warnings on the television, but I hadn't seen them. At the first flash of lightning, I'd stopped the video I'd been watching - "Twister," ironically - and turned off the VCR and the television.

My home was spared but I had no telephone or electricity. I went through the routine common to those in rural areas with spotty electrical service, running through the house unplugging computers, televisions, radios, VCRs, refrigerators, water pumps, anything that could be damaged by a power surge when the electricity was restored.

After my boyfriend returned home, we felt we had to do something. All we could think of was to go to the village firehouse to see if we could help, and that five-mile journey seemed like a ride through a war zone. Trees that had just recently come into full foliage were snapped apart and strewn everywhere.

As I drove, I had to maneuver around the power lines that littered the roads, and gawking at the unbelievable damage the storm caused threatened to distract me. I'd seen these scenes a hundred times, shining out from the television in news reports of tornados in other places. They had an entirely different impact upon me now that I was seeing them first hand.

Dozens of others had the same thought. We congregated, dazed and bewildered. The air was hot and oppressively humid, and more intense thunderstorms continued to roll through. Since phone lines were down, volunteers with CB radios fanned out through the town, reporting back on the damage. By midnight, all of the life-threatening problems had been dealt with. Nothing more would be attempted that evening, since the power lines down everywhere posed an immediate risk.

Living in the country, we were used to not having streetlights. But the drive home was eerie as we passed spots where we'd always been able to see Mechanicville across the Hudson.

The city's lights had always twinkled below in the valley. But tonight, the valley was dark, indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. Mechanicville had been hit especially hard, and the impact was worse there because the population was denser. The only visible light from the city were car headlights and the flashing red ones atop police cars and fire trucks.

On our side of the river, friends and neighbors lost farm animals, pets and outbuildings, cars, roofs and swimming pools in seconds. Barns were crushed by flying trees. A cultivator now perched precariously on the bracing bar between two tall metal silos. Trees that once densely covered hillsides now lay prone against them. The work of many lifetimes destroyed in seconds.

A week later, we still had no power. No refrigerator. No running water. No stove. No television. No computers. I spent most of my free time sitting in the back yard brooding. I was snappish and depressed, and didn't want to talk to anyone. I stopped my car next to an electric company work crew and began screaming at them, asking them what they were doing, didn't they know there still wasn't any power on River Road?

After power was restored, life resumed some semblance of normalcy. We took long hot showers and cleaned up after a week of camping in our own home. I began to feel a little less anxious, but my natural sense of invulnerability had been shaken. I still felt a strong sense of loss, although I couldn't identify its cause.

I drove through the storm's path every day on my way to work. It took time before I could get past the enormity of it all to see specific images in the devastation. The one that stands out in my mind is of an old pine tree close to the road.

It was thirty feet high, and only six feet of it remained now. I'd seen it nearly every day, and knew it for the hawk's nest in its crown, used year after year. All that remained now was a bare trunk, the sharp splinters at the top a testament to what had torn it apart. I slowed down to get a closer look at it.

For some inexplicable reason, it jolted me. I had to pull off to the shoulder as I started to weep uncontrollably, releasing all of the anger and sorrow that I'd kept prisoner inside me since the day of the storm.

As the weeks passed, I watched as that tree miraculously began to sprout tufts of needles, then the short stumps of branches. I thought the tree was dead without its branches to capture the power of the sun. But the roots were still intact and could nourish that stump.

Three years later, the splinters at the top of the trunk had weathered to a sedate gray and the branches that erupted from the trunk that first summer had been pushing out branches of their own. The farmer who owned the land cleared it just a month ago, bulldozing my broken pine, and I grieved the loss of that tree as if it had been something all my own.

That tree was something special. For me it was a lesson about hope and the tenacity of life. The tree may be gone, but I'll always remember it.