The Tornado, the Blessing, and the Curse

Our New House Under a Fallen 500-Year-Old Oak Tree

A couple of weeks ago, my parents announced they will be moving from California to Winston-Salem to be closer to family. So, right now, Gayle, our friend Caren, and I are a mile away from home, touring a house with my parents by Facetime.

We’re checking out the view from a screened-in porch when out of nowhere, a driving, sideways rain blows through the screens, turning the room into a chamber of mist. In one sweeping motion, the sky goes dark. The lights flicker and the power goes out. Weird.

Undeterred, my parents’ agent continues Facetiming while I shine my phone’s flashlight on the scene. It rings but I ignore it, trying to keep on task. Then Gayle’s phone rings. It’s Annie. She’s terrified. Gayle turns to me. “A tree has fallen on the house.” Our house.

Just crossing the 50 feet between the front door of this house and the RAV, I’m soaked. It’s pouring buckets. I fire up the vehicle and notice trash cans floating down the street. I pull up and Gayle and Caren jump in, slam the doors and we tear away, on a beeline for home.

Before we clear two blocks I have to hit the brakes. There’s a downed tree in the middle of the road. The RAV cuts a block over and I have to hit the brakes again. Another downed tree. We zig-zag across the West End, finally finding a street with only branches strewn across it. The RAV stomps over them and we’re back on course, sending up ten-foot walls of water as we cross muddy streams; wipers slapping hard. My head is on a swivel, watching for downed wires or anything falling.

Back home, before the tree comes crashing down, Annie notices the rain getting harder. She steps to the large glass window in the front door and sees Aedin returning from walking the dog but he pauses on the front porch, checking his phone. The rain is blowing sideways behind him. Worried, she tells him to come inside. As he steps in, Annie’s boyfriend crosses in from the other room and pulls out his phone to video the crazy rain and the sudden sweeping darkness outside. Before he can tap record —

BOOM!

A rush of leaves and branches and a tremendous crash shakes the house. Crystals fly off a chandelier, skittering over the floor. A shower of water rains down in the next room.

Annie rallies everyone. Urging them away from the glass windows and down the hall to a doorframe by the basement steps. Her earthquake training kicking in.

Outside, the RAV rounds the corner to our street. The details we have so far are, a tree hit the house. Annie is scared. Everyone is okay. In my mind I’ve been thinking, Please don’t let it be that 100-year-old oak out front. The thing is five feet across at the trunk and 100 feet tall. The spread of the canopy is enormous. It’s a house-killer.

I jerk the RAV to a stop out front and lean over the steering wheel, taking in the scene above us through the windshield. Half the canopy of that giant oak tore off, landing on the house; covering it. A huge section of those limbs look like they sheered away from the main fallen branch, mangling the roof of the porch and breaking retaining walls as they tumbled into the front yard, consuming it and the sidewalk below.

I’m out of the vehicle, looking for an approach to the house but the entire front is blocked by a tangle of massive limbs. Power lines are down in the street. The rain is torrential.

“Watch those power lines!”

Gayle and Caren are out of the car now too. Gayle is bent at the waist, one hand over her mouth, the other one over her stomach. The dream home she just moved into two weeks ago – her vision of our new life here – is smashed. She looks at me. “Did I cause this? By being too happy?” Her eyes are wide, taking in the fulfillment of a curse she believes she carries. The hammer of the gods is never far off. She knows our kids are okay but still, they are inside, under this debris. It’s all an emotional gut punch.

“Caren, can you call Duke Power? Tell them there are lines down in the street.” Caren pulls out her phone. She’s a doctor and very cool under stress. I hear her running them through the situation as our neighbor, Mark, comes over.

“Thank God. I saw the whole thing come down. We thought you were inside.” Other neighbors are coming out of their houses. We reassure them everyone is safe inside.

While Caren and Gayle make calls to emergency services, I head up the neighbor’s driveway. There’s a retaining wall dividing our properties. I find a gap between our hedge and the top of the wall and slither through on my belly.

On my feet again, I look toward the front steps to the porch. Debris everywhere – the power line to the house entangled in it. Some other cable – maybe an internet line – hangs down by my head.

I jog down the side yard, around to the back and open the kitchen door. Aedin, Annie, her boyfriend, and Nelson are all huddled together by that door to the basement. The dog is still on his leash from his walk. He’s shivering.

“Are you all okay?”

They are. Annie puts her arms around me. “Dad!” She got everyone this far but she’s been sitting here bracing, not knowing what to do next; what the damage looks like outside, or what might come.

“You’re okay.”

They recount the sight of limb tips falling far away - near the street – then much closer – huge branches filling their view – then the crashing and shaking of the house; how they retreated back to this strong point and hunkered down.

“That’s good. You did good. There’s a big tree on the house but it will hold. You’re safe. Just sit tight right here for a minute. I need to check things out.”

My phone screen displays a shower of rain coming down from the light fixtures in the guest bathroom downstairs. “Better get a bucket under that,” I mutter. I’m recording a video for the insurance claim I know is coming.

I jog upstairs, looking for the source of the leak. Nothing in the sleeping porch. I turn and open a door in the knee wall, revealing an attic-like space with a banged up heat pump surrounded by splintered wood and bunches of green oak leaves, still attached to the stumps of two big limbs that have speared right in through the roof. Rain pours in through the holes in torrents.

My first thought is to grab my chainsaw from the basement. I’ve got to stop this water from pouring in. To do that, the limb’s got to go. But there’s no angle. No room to even get the saw through to cut the limbs back. We do, however, have a hatch that opens onto the top of the roof.

I climb the steps to the hatch and give it a shove. Nothing. I put my shoulder to it. It won’t budge. I notice the metal is deformed. Dented. The tree is on it. It’s on everything, like a giant squid wrapping a ship up in its tentacles.

I put an earbud in and call Gayle, giving her the update. She and Caren will need to come around back through the alley gate. I’ll open it up. The front is a no go.

From the windows on the second floor I can see where the tree is. I follow the line of the downed limbs from inside, checking the walls and ceilings for holes as I go. I find a small one blown through the back of Annie’s closet but no rain coming in.

I spare a moment to think of the 120-year-old-slate roof behind this ceiling and the intricate metal work along the ridge beam fashioned by the Moravian craftsmen who lived here. It’s all smashed.

Downstairs, I check back with the kids. Annie is crying. Pent up emotion letting go.

“Dad, I feel really bad. I sent Aedin to walk the dog. He came back when it started raining hard. He walked up on the porch right before the tree hit the house.” She looks at me with a grave expression. “I almost killed him.”

We step out on the front porch to look at the damage. The ceiling, painted light blue for good luck, has a ten-foot-long hole torn in it. Rafters are exposed like ribs through an open wound. There’s a scar on the house’s siding where a tall, black shutter used to sit. The shutter is now laying in the side yard, torn from its metal hinges by a large, lichen-covered oak limb, a foot in diameter, now laying across three pieces of banged up wicker furniture.

When the rain first started, the kids had been sitting right here in these wicker chairs, watching the weather turn. Annie tells me two minutes elapsed between when Aedin left to walk the dog; returned due to the rain, and the tree collapsed onto the house around them. He’d only been back inside for 30-40 seconds.

Later, a neighbor will tell me that a workman on a roof a few houses away spotted a funnel cloud overhead just before the sideways rain and the sudden plunge into darkness. A tornado cut a path through the West End and right to our door.

I let out a long, slow breath. Had anything gone even slightly different on this porch, things could have turned out much, much worse. A block away, another giant tree cut an unoccupied carriage house in half. You can look into it like a dollhouse. Our place looks good by comparison. Maybe there’s something to that blue paint.

Our tree clearing man will tell me it was the hand of God. He’s seen about everything over the years. Some things he says he wishes he hadn’t seen. He looks to the house and the massive limbs resting on it. This is about the biggest tree he’s dealt with. He’s surprised the house held. “They built them different back then.” I tell him about Aedin’s close call and he goes solemn. His voice hushed. “I believe that was…” He looks upward. “Something different.” I nod.

“I’m extremely grateful.”

Later, after the tree is gone, I’ll count the rings on the giant stump. There is some rot in the middle and the scarring of the chainsaws makes it hard to see the middle two feet. I stop counting rings around 400 or so. I’m guessing it might be 500 years old. This thing was ancient and massive. About as old as our country is now, back when The Declaration was signed.

We’ve been charging devices on the RAV’s inverter and lighter ports, making calls to insurance companies, mitigation teams, and the emergency lodging coordinator, just in case. Everything is in motion on the claim.

We had to turn down a couple of tree services that were talking about ropes and chain saws. They were way overmatched against this oak and I could see the fear in their eyes when they looked at it. The tree clearing man we are going with handed us an estimate for $14,800. It’s going to take a team of eight men, two giant cranes with grapple saws and a sawyer in a condor crane to attack this. The fact we are insured is the only thing keeping my eyes from popping out of my skull when I read the estimate.

The fire department came by earlier and shut off the main breaker in case our wiring was damaged. Now a gang of men in headlamps from Duke power are working on the lines outside.

The massive tree is still on the house. Gayle and I decide all five of us plus Nelson will fall back to the carriage house for the night. There’s no point sleeping under the sword of Damocles.

While they get settled in, I muck out drywall, broken bulbs, and insulation from the downstairs bathroom. Earlier in the day, I was about to slide a big cooler in there to catch the leaking water when the whole ceiling collapsed right in front of me.

I dry the floor as best I can but hear water gurgling its way down the heat register in the floor. I’ll save that problem for tomorrow.

We’ve only been moved in for two weeks so a lot of things are still in boxes. It takes some time to rummage around between the basement and storeroom until I find an air mattress and run it up to the carriage house. On my way, the guys from Duke Power spot my headlamp. They call over to say they’ve got the power back on for the street and offer to take a minute to help me bypass our main house power and run it back to the carriage house only. Solid guys.

When they first rolled up they told Gayle that the good news was they were prioritizing calls by who was hit the worst. The bad news was that we were their first call.

The AC is now running and the carriage house is cool. I tiptoe past Annie, asleep on the couch. Her boyfriend is nearby on the leaky air mattress. Aedin is racked out on a convertible chair mattress on the kitchen floor, giving up his double bed for Gayle and me.

Gayle was feeling sick before any of this drama and it’s only gotten worse. She’s now in bed with a pounding headache and sinus pain. She wonders if it’s Covid. As I set a few essentials on her nightstand she rolls over and looks at me. “Did I cause this?” I reassure her she did not and we’ll get it all back to normal. She drifts off to sleep.

Rifling through the fridge back in the main house, I come up with a beer. It’s still cold.

I pop the cap and sit down outside on the carriage house porch to catch up on texts. It’s 1am. I learn that my parents bought the house we were touring by Facetime earlier today. It had multiple offers within the day so it was crunch time. Before the news of the tree falling, I had taken videos of the place. I managed to tap send on my phone while I dealt with everything else. Luckily the videos sent and were a good addition to their agent’s tour by flashlight. I see my buddy also commented on a video I sent him of the tree on the house. He replied, “Welcome to the south!” My friends are a stoic lot. Sparing in their supportive texts.

I sip the beer and look out on our house across the yard, faintly washed with the crazy, multi-colored flashing light of an LED strip in the garage below. It must have come back on with the power in party mode.

Somewhere in the dark beyond the house I picture a path of toppled trees and shattered limbs carved by a twister, leading right up to our front door. Hammer of the Gods.

What a day.