The Late August Storm
When the rains come heavy, especially in the middle of the night, my heartbeat tries to keep up with the drops on the roof. It feels like my heart will give out first. The winds sound vicious, but they’re not my concern.
What I’m afraid of is the flood.
The flood punctures the idea of security with every drip that pries its way through the seams in the foundation of our home. The flood doesn’t come very often, not even every year, but it comes more than it used to, and it will come more often still. The chances of the flood are 1%, or even 0.1%. They call it a hundred year or a thousand year storm. But what does it mean when you get several of them in three years? Those numbers are relics from the time that the changing climate was moving at a slower pace.
The flood is small by most measures. It is just in the tiny backyard. But when the pavers and hostas and the sedges are totally and completely drowned by the rain, even if only for minutes and not hours, I know it might be coming for our home.
The storm came in late summer. The radar kept telling me that the rain was going to end. I paced around the house at four o’clock in the morning waiting for the deluge to end. But it seemed too content to write its own rules as it hovered over our town instead of moving east as a storm should do.
Eventually the water came trickling in, then it began to stream. At the same time, the rain finally relented. I frantically rearranged furniture, laid towels, filled buckets until the pace went back to a trickle. I went out to the flood and tried to push the water down the small hill, anywhere, away from our home. Down the drain. I couldn’t tell if it worked but I had to try. Soaked and up to my calves in standing water only, hours before the sun came up, I gave up. We were fine. So far, we always are. Some scrap pieces of carpet were the only real casualty. At least until the next thousand year rain.
Not far, roads were submerged and turning into rivers. Parking lots, lakes. Creeks above their banks, swales failing, carrying concrete, plastics, temporary and forever chemicals and whatever else lodged loose during the deluge.
Nearby, in the tree covered slopes near the river it looked like a path was carved out by God but it was just the wind. Or maybe not just. It was the wind, though. I don’t know how long those trees had stood strong in the seasons prior to this late summer but so many in that path gave way on that night. Destruction doesn’t look so stark when it is masked by a full green canopy but in winter the brokenness and uprootedness is on full display. More than one hundred mature trees were gone.
Now the bare trees reach towards the heavens and have more space between them. The cracked and felled trunks intersperse between them. The forest floor is a denser cacophony of root masses, tangles, and holes.
I couldn’t imagine the broken trunks when the storm came, I was only worried about the flood. Now the forest has partially collapsed, except in some ways it feels total. Every uprooted tree leaves a mass that looks like a displaced heart. It lies bare in the dirt, ventricles cut off. Eventually, or in some cases already, it will be a new home to the animals of the woods and the cycle will start over.
These storms will keep coming. Is the forest going to collapse each time? I guess there would have to be an end point. When so many hit their breaking point what will the rest endure? If the protection is in groups, each and every tree is more exposed, more vulnerable every time.
But before the storm the canopy was too dense for young oaks, a pillar of the forest. They have a chance now. Very little seems absolute.
After injury there needs to be recovery. If there is enough time, maybe.
