the ice storm, part 1

My friends’ parklike lawn is eerily transformed.

Putting aside my worries about frozen pipes or frozen cats at my house, I accepted the invitation of some friends of mine to weather the ice storm at their lovely generator-powered home. On Thursday morning (January 6th), I donned my hat and coat, picked up my trusty $78 dollar two megapixel Finepix digital camera, and took a stroll through a wonderland of sculptured ice.

These reeds made an interesting pattern.

Nature needs no chainsaw, but she might as well have one. Observing this storm was oddly bittersweet, for the temporary beauty of the ice left behind permanent scars. I assumed, at first, that perhaps this was nature’s way of cleaning up the weaker branches and trees, that only the stronger trees would remain. After looking at many trees, however, I concluded this natural selection was not necessarily to the benifit of the fittest. Some kinds of trees are flexible. Some are less so. But even two equally healthy trees of the same variety could suffer different fates. Some trees with widely spreading branches somehow did not break, while others with shorter branches that reached heavenward were ripped down.

This tree is one of several I saw which were utterly destroyed by the ice. This tree was about 50 feet tall before it was splintered clear down to the roots, below the level of the topsoil.

It was chaos. Some branches just happened to have a barely too unlucky angle of inclination, or a few too many twigs, or an otherwise inconsequential and invisible flaw deep within the wood. Whatever the reasons, on this morning all the trees were separated into survivors and firewood.

I have 14 other photos of the ice storm which I’ll be posting over the next few days.