For three long, cold days this fall I was afraid to leave my house.
Agoraphobia?
No. Heart-break!
The streets around my house in Maplewood, New Jersey, were littered with victims of Superstorm Sandy. In one black, tempestuous, surreal, and fateful night, the storm’s 70-mile-an-hour winds had ripped the landscape apart.
Giant trees – towering oaks, Londonplane trees, and the majestic maples for which my town had been named a century or more ago – lay twisted and split, sprawled across streets and across each other, huge and mute and dead as soldiers in a Matthew Brady Daguerreotype of a Civil War battlefield.
Some had taken other victims down with them: the power lines that plunged us into darkness for eight long, cold days…countless roofs and windows and cars that now lay helpless in their leafy embrace. Decades, even centuries, of growth — summers of shade, autumns of glorious color – undone in one screeching, cracking, crashing instant.
Other awful sounds had quickly followed that late October disaster — the shriek of ambulances and police cars, the cacophony of chainsaws, near and far. In between, the sound of silence may have been the most awesome of all. No commuter trains rattled in and out ofManhattan. No planes hummed in and out of nearbyNewarkAirport.
Our busy little village was stilled, stunned. Streets were everywhere blocked by fallen trees. Trying to go across town led into a maze of dead ends, yellow police tape, and alternate routes to nowhere.
With cars trapped in their driveways, people began to walk. Whole families ventured out the next morning to survey the storm’s fury. They stood in quiet knots, awe-struck by the sight of a 90-foot oak — still wearing a rope swing — flung like a bridge across the street from one neighbor’s yard through the dining room windows of another. Two giant maples jackknifed over a splintered garage, the tail light of the car crushed inside still glittering in the sun.
They looked and, like me, they were heartbroken. “Trees are like children,” one homeowner said. “You nurture them, you watch them grow up.”
Sandy took away generations of tree “children.” The Southern magnolia a friend trucked North for me in the trunk of her SUV. A dogwood that had been someone’s Mother’s Day present. The maple my son planted 12 years ago — too close to the drive, but still it managed to flourish there.
According to later tallies, Sandy ripped up more than 8,500 street trees and thousands more in parks in New York City alone. New Jerseyis still counting, and it’s clear that it will cost millions just to take away the splintered remains.
The true value of trees is priceless. Living, breathing – helping humans live and breathe – trees may be our best friends and allies on earth. Wood is our natural habitat, our oldest and most reliable building material. When we panel our walls, cover our floors, create heirloom furniture from beautiful hardwoods, we are rejoicing in a thing of beauty that should be a joy forever.
Small wonder that seeing a storm destroy all that in an instant struck so close to home, so painfully close to our hearts.