Published: August 02, 2008 11:33 pm            

Stephanie Salter: What kind of helmet is best for sitting under a tree?

A neighbor and I were talking about the good old days, when thunderstorms were kind of fun and trees were our friends.

We were out in the street near the tree row where a pile of limbs and branches has been growing next to my yard since those 80 mph straight winds careened through the Valley in February.

Remember that storm? Freakish, tornado-like conditions here, real tornadoes all over the South? Hundreds of trees uprooted or snapped in half across two-thirds of Indiana?

I lost two small trees in that storm. Another neighbor lost a century-old hickory from his back yard. Eight trees in all on just our block were either blown down or mortally wounded and had to be taken out.

Who knew that the spring and summer would bring more of the same — and worse, with the great floods of early June?

The increasing pile of storm-damaged tree debris is the best gauge I have to keep track of this year’s weather. It shows me what I have lost and it implies the macrocosm:

In summers before, city crews made regular, post-storm trips around town, picking up tree pieces and feeding them into a rolling wood chipper. Too big to stuff into my trash bin or bind with twine, my mounting pile seems apparent testimony to the compounding backlog of such city clean-up assignments.

It also speaks of the frenzy for private landscape and hauling firms. Three of the companies I’ve called to see about taking the limbs away haven’t even called back. The only one that did quoted a price that nearly matches my mortgage payment.

So the pile keeps growing.

Long ago I lost count of the number of times I’ve had to clear branches from the driveway just so I can back out, or I’ve stopped my car in the middle of a neighborhood street, gotten out and dragged a giant limb out of the road or off a backed-up sewer grate.

A month or so ago, on a morning after yet another storm, I went out on my back patio to sweep up little wisps of branches and leaves. A couple minutes after I’d collected a small mound, I moved about eight feet away to the garden hose. With a soft crack and a loud rush, a huge limb fell from high up in my hackberry bush tree and crashed onto the very spot I’d just been standing.

I figured the limb weighed about 15 pounds. In one of those surreal moments where you actually look upon a scene that could have been your death or critical injury — but wasn’t — I felt oddly calm, but moved to my marrow.

Could have died. Didn’t. Whew. Carpe diem.

Not long after that a fellow Collett Park resident, Rick Mascari, gently warned me about the hackberry bush tree. A professional landscaper and small-tree arborist, Rick had been visiting my neighbor who’d lost the old hickory.

Standing in our alley, Rick said that all the downed trees and broken limbs after every storm were, naturally, disturbing to individual homeowners but pretty much a byproduct of the aging process of trees. Folks could prolong a tree’s life by pruning and tending to bugs and disease, he said, but eventually, “trees are just like people, they wear out.”

And fall down.

Rick looked up to the top of the hackberry that rises nearly three stories behind my house. Ugly as it is, I’ve loved and admired that tree since I moved in. Over the years, as its girth has expanded, it has warped a cinderblock-and-mortar wall. Its huge canopy filters the late-afternoon and evening sun, allowing me a few degrees of cooling power for free.

“Like that old tree,” Rick said, gesturing up. “They get compromised like that and become a threat.”

Compromised? I thought the hackberry was in great shape. All those green leaves.

Now, as Rick pointed out its vulnerable spots and other signs of age, I realized the hackberry was like the slim white pine in the front yard that leans toward the street, the huge oak nearer the house that seems more steeply inclined to the south, and even the many maple, ash and sycamore trees that stand straight and tall around my home.

They’re wonderful trees that can be transformed by wind and water into potential killers and house wreckers.

For now, I wait and watch them all — and flinch at the sound of branches and limbs dropping onto my roof. After a particularly wet or wind-whipped storm, I join my neighbors on pickup patrol and clear the drive and yard of downed wood.

Out on the tree row, the pile of the dead grows taller.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.