At 8:40 on Monday night the lights flickered, and a second later there was a sound from the backyard like someone snapping a broom handle over their knee, only much bigger and much longer. Then a thud I felt through the floor.
It had been 91 degrees all afternoon, the kind of heavy July day that ends in a storm, and this one came in fast from the west: wind first, then rain going sideways past the kitchen window. Nate was at the screen door watching it, because he likes storms. Mateo and I were on the couch. Pim had already gone under our bed an hour earlier, apparently better informed than the weather service.
What came down
We have a silver maple in the back corner of the yard. It's the biggest thing on our lot, probably older than anyone on our street, and silver maples are known for brittle wood. A limb about ten inches thick at the base tore off the trunk and came down across the back of the yard.
We didn't go out until the lightning stopped. By flashlight it looked as though the tree had lain down in the grass. In the morning it was clearer:
- Sixteen feet of the back stockade fence flattened, two 8-foot panels down and both posts snapped at the ground.
- The end of the east bed nearest the fence under the branches. One Cherokee Purple crushed flat, and both of the square cages at that end bent sideways.
- A smaller branch had hit the back of the house and left a long dent in the gutter.
- The native strip along the fence mostly fine, with a few plugs pressed flat under twigs.
Nobody was hurt, and the house itself was fine. The torn end of the limb was pale as bread inside and smelled sweet and green, which is a strange thing to notice standing in a mess like that, but I did.
The first two days
On Tuesday evening, after work, Nate cut the smaller branches loose with a bow saw and stacked them by the driveway. The main limb was too big for us and still partly hung up on the stub, which is exactly the situation where people get hurt, so we left it alone.
The bigger worry was the fence. Sixteen feet down means the yard was wide open to Gus, and the hardware cloth apron we put in last month was pinned under a broken panel. Nate wired the least broken panel back upright as a temporary wall, and I filled the rest of the gap with spare stakes and the old row cover. It's ugly, and it has held for three nights.
Nate straightened both cages with his hands and a rubber mallet. The crushed Cherokee Purple had a dozen green tomatoes on it. I picked every one, and they're lined up on the kitchen windowsill, where two of the biggest are starting to blush. That leaves eleven tomato plants this year instead of twelve.
Three quotes
From Tuesday to Thursday, three tree services came to look. All three were insured and offered to send a certificate, which was my first question. The first quoted $1,400, which covered removing the limb and hauling it, plus a "full assessment" of the tree and some pruning we hadn't asked for. The second quoted $1,150 for removal and hauling, but they'd leave the chipped wood in a pile in our yard. The third quoted $950 to lower the limb in sections, make a clean cut back at the branch collar, haul away every piece and rake up. They could come Friday.
We picked the $950 crew. The work they described matched the others, minus the extras, and the owner was the one who climbed up and looked at the stub, not a salesman with a clipboard. He said the rest of the tree looked sound to him, but it would be worth having an arborist look at it in winter, when the leaves are down. That's on the list.
The bill so far
The tree crew comes tomorrow morning, and that's $950. A gutter company came out Wednesday and quoted $340 to repair the dented section, and they can come next Wednesday. Nate priced the fence at Home Depot: two new 8-foot stockade panels, posts, concrete and hardware come to about $670, and he and Sal plan to do the work themselves this weekend.
That adds up to about $1,960. None of it goes in the garden budget, which I'm keeping strictly for the garden, even when the garden gets flattened. I've called our Allstate agent to ask whether this is worth a homeowners claim, and once we decide I'll write up how we thought it through.
Sal came over Tuesday at 7 a.m., stood at the edge of the wreck with his coffee and a tape measure, looked at the snapped posts for a long time and said one word: "Saturday." That's the fence plan.
