Derecho! It’s a terrific new scary weather word, just
entering our vocabulary, thanks to Climate Change and our meteorologists. It’s a
straight line thunderstorm, the kind they speak of as showing a radar “bow echo.”
The eastern seaboard recently experienced a knock-out punch from a big one. We
here in south central PA took a sideswipe from the big storm, the
same one which disappeared the electricity from millions of people, in a swath
which ran from the Alleghenies onto the coastal plain of Virginia.
I woke in the night to hear it coming. At first, I thought
it was just Norfolk Southern, whose trains power up and down our valley all
night, but I grew up in western Ohio, near Xenia, in fact, which blew away in
the great tornado outbreak of 1974, so that kind of noise makes me anxious. When
I got up, wind was roaring through the open windows, and the night sky looked
thick, like a rushing wall of dirty water. Lightning came blasting in, then pouring
rain—time to stop staring and run to see if Bob was at the door, looking for
sanctuary. Next, run to close windows. Then it was time to get the heck away
from those windows, because, along with the lightning and roaring wind, limbs
were crashing down, things were striking the siding and there was a series of
huge cracks and house-shaking thuds. Someone’s trees—maybe mine—were going
over.
Now, I’ll walk back a step. All summer we’ve been serenaded
from the neighbor’s fine tall Norwegian maple by a catbird. IMHO the catbird is
the true subject of the old song—sure, you know the one. “He rocks in the tree tops all the day long, huffin’ and puffin’ and a
singin’ his song…” All members of the mockingbird family are genius jazz
musicians, riffing on their own—and everybody else’s songs. I’ve even heard
them do crows, as a sort of end of set caw-da-boom. They take the “catbird
seat” to best show off their talents, which is the highest tree or pole or, in
days of yore, TV antenna on the tallest house they can find.
Our storm came hard and fast and left the same way. At 5:30
a.m., the light was just coming up and the sky was clearing. The neighbors, I
could tell, were out walking around. When
I came out to join them, I was shocked by the damage. Three large, beautiful maples
on the street were ripped apart, looking as if a big hand had come down and yanked
the limbs off. Only shattered trunks remained. Enormous branches, leaves, dead
wood, siding and kid toys were everywhere. Across the street from me, where the
shapely old Norwegian maple had been, was only the shattered stub of trunk. All
the branches now lay on the roof of their house.
On the broken tip of the tree sat the cat bird, as he’d done
since spring. He kept moving around on the raw wood, gazing at the leafy
paradise in which he’d once lived, now on the ground below. He tried to sing
once or twice, just a few grace notes, but his heart wasn’t in it. The green
shade world in which he’d lived, loved and rejoiced was gone forever.
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