Storms a' Brewing

Friday morning two weeks ago at 4 am-awakened by the high keening of the building security system, draining of power-I witnessed an enormous red cedar come crashing down in the wind. I had been at the window only a few minutes, watching the trees in the park toss. They moved like Ents, capacious and rubbery in their spring and slack, bending alive in the gales.

Except for my favorite twin trees. These two red cedars were just too thick, too bushy. The great roiling of their boughs was not enough. They caught the wind, billowed. The entire trees were leaning, leaning outward. Then one broke away. It fell, slowly at first, roots ripping out of the sod. Then it crashed down, an enormous mast. The metal fencepoles of the tennis courts snapped beneath it, like a huge clatter of dishes.

I hope I never again see a tree with such presence fall. It was unbelievable-up till the moment it fell, as it was falling, I could not believe what I was witnessing was real. Such a large red cedar, several stories tall. It was especially lovely in the fall-the upper, outer boughs were thick with clusters of immature cones, yellow and pea-green.And something about how the branches spiralled was very unusual: when they whorled in the wind the tree stood flush upright, bushy and triangular like a Japanese umbrella pine.

In the morning I went out to inspect the damage. The remaining cedar looked off-kilter. Barren, missing its twin-one could see how the trunk had grown just slightly curved, to make space for the tree that was its gemini in life.

The parks board people felt it was too much of a liability to leave the remaining cedar standing. I was at my window when the tree feller arrived, driving a white parks board truck over the grass. His chainsaw blade was three feet wide. I felt like I was witnessing a murder, a silent scream. Two neat cuts and this green live spirit came crashing down.

That evening I left for Manning Park. Three hours away, far into the back country, uprooted pines dragged and dangled in the power lines, one fallen at least every hundred metres.

It's almost ten years since the majority of nobel laureates in science called on world leaders to halt human induced climate change. The science on climate change is definitive, as clear as smoking's contributions to lung cancer. Yet the Georgia Straight last Thursday was the first local media to state the obvious: rapid, dramatic climate change is unfolding in our lifetimes, and increasingly frequent and severe windstorms are only one example.