Another One Bites the Dust

I do my best (and actually usually succeed) to take a daily walk around our property.  I worked it out that three laps around equals a mile (I have no idea if it really does.  I just counted the number of steps to walk around and calculated at 30 inches per step, so maybe.  Does it matter, as long as I get outside and walk?)

This daily walk was disrupted by Hurricane Michael (aka The Storm).  I literally could not find the path because everything was knee-deep in what used to be the tree canopy, and there were trees down over much of it.  Three months later, we got the last loop of the path cleared.

Until last week, when another tree hit the ground.

We've been keeping an eye on it.  It was in a group of 3-4 trees that came down behind the house, still sort of upright but leaning.  The lean was parallel to the house, so it wouldn't hit if it came down, and with the tangle of other trees it would have been too dangerous for the tree guys to try to take it down.

The root end of the group of trees.

  The one that just fell is the one going across the picture

--the root ball is hidden in the underbrush

So we just let it stay there.  But recently it started popping and cracking and slipping a bit.  Then one night I went outside to call for one of the cats.  With a sound and feeling hard to describe--cracking and rending and swooshing  (picture the old Batman sounds--BAM!  SWOOSH!  THUD!)  it came down.  I was about 20 feet away and could feel it hit the ground.  I yelled--I like to think I was using colorful language, but I just wasn't that coherent.  It was like all that energy had to be released from me somehow.  We paced the tree out--over 100 feet tall.  That's a lot of power when it comes down.

We wondered why it fell when it did.  For once, we haven't had much rain.  Or wind.  It takes a lot of force to drop a tree.  What could have caused it?

The answer:  Life.  Spring comes early in the south.  Although about half the rootball of this tree was pulled up, the other half was still in the ground.  The tree doesn't know that it's, well, dead.  So it's budding out.

That's hundreds of gallons of water being sent out to the tips of the branches (as I said, this was a *big* tree).  Enough to tip it over.

It's sort of philosophically sad.  The attempt to continue to live is what finished it off.  But who knows?  We're going to (very carefully) cut back the branches that are in the way, but leave the others alone.  We might end up with a leafy arch over my path.  Life finds a way.