Forty years ago we had about 40 trees in our less-than-half-acre backyard. Now we have 4-½ trees.
Some died of natural causes. The old plum succumbed to black knot. The dogwoods developed anthracnose. I cut down the five-variety apple tree that produced the world’s only crop of black delicious apples, each with a grubworm inside that nauseated colleagues when I brought the fruit to lunch. I could have sprayed, but I chose to skip both cancer and birth defects. I murdered two big crabapples whose rotting fruit attracted yellowjackets and made venturing outside perilous.
The balance of our trees, mostly Norway and Colorado Blue Spruce, lined both sides of the backyard and survived until really fierce nor’easters began attacking Hopewell in 2010. With the first big blow, eight trees came down. Hurricane Sandy knocked down another 10 spruces, which caught the wind like sails and were swept flat. Subsequent storms took down the remaining evergreens, with the last one uprooted this spring.
On the upside, I now have more sun for my vegetable garden, and I’ve become somewhat adept with a chainsaw after lots of trial and even more error. I burned out an inherited electric chainsaw quickly. (I may have installed the chain backwards.) My next chainsaw, a bargain item, took tremendous effort to start and ultimately even those efforts didn’t work. Finally, I bought a quality machine and even learned how to sharpen the chain. So far, despite persistent fear, I have cut up lots of wood without amputating any body parts. Most importantly, while cutting up trees, I get to sing (to myself, of course) Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack, and I’m OK.”
After each storm, I spent days wheelbarrowing the logs to the curb where the gracious township could pick up the massive piles. A downside to pushing all those barrow-loads was my introduction to the wonderful world of back pain. After waking up one morning and having to crawl across the floor to get to my toothbrush, I tried a series of useless cortisone shots, useless acupuncture treatments and potentially lethal doses of ibuprofen.
Ultimately, I abandoned all futile cure-alls and my back healed itself, a miracle that required no religious intervention.
Aside from my back and the loss of trees, the only other physical damage was when Hurricane Sandy dropped a spruce through the garage roof. However, far more catastrophic was the dread experience common to most everyone in the region: no electricity. For us, that meant no heat, no water and no light for 12 days.
We tried keeping warm by staying late at work and using the fireplace when we came home. However, we have the worst fireplace in the universe. More air conditioner than heater, it sucks warm air out of the house and replaces it with cold air. In fact, the only way to derive any heat from our fireplace is to crawl into it and sit on the flaming logs. After four days of indoor camping, gnashing of teeth and cursing the power company for being so slow to restore power, we moved in with wonderfully tolerant friends.
The Sandy blackout followed years of shorter outages, finally forcing me to succumb to my wife’s piteous pleading to buy a generator. Its gasoline engine is noisy, unpleasant to start, and my wife is still annoyed that I didn’t opt for a $10,000, propane-powered machine.
Not all our meteorologically induced inconvenience has been above ground. There was a subterranean dimension as well, i.e. a flooded basement. When we moved to Hopewell, we discovered that after every rain, a lake would form in the basement. Initially, I put on a yachting cap and sailed my flotilla of little plastic boats across the watery floor. Then, I contacted several dry basement contractors, a most suspect group. Each sales rep bragged about his company’s services while displaying clippings recounting lawsuits filed against their competitors for unscrupulous business practices.
Consequently, I decided to fix the basement myself. I dug a sump in the corner and installed a pump. I built a brick-lined moat around the periphery of the basement, directing water to the sump. I painted the cinderblock walls with waterproof paint. I drilled weep holes into the base of the walls which, due to hydrostatic pressure, resulted in water shooting out horizontally.
So now I have a relatively dry basement, three beech trees, one dogwood, a terminal crabapple and a generator. The recent upsurge of extreme weather and subsequent destruction is clear evidence of climate change, a connection not clear to science-deniers, AKA morons.
Robin Schore lives in Titusville.
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