Nature is Never Spent

I think my favorite tree on campus is a huge white oak on a corner near the human resources building. The white oak is my favorite oak to begin with, and this tree is all alone with no other trees around, so it seems extra precious. In an area with a lot of pavement and ugly, practical brick and metal buildings, one big old tree is so different from no trees at all.



Today as I was walking toward it on my way to my office, I altered my route by a few feet to avoid some mud, and I saw a side of the tree I've never noticed. It was like looking at a cross-section of a tree: the branches on one half of the tree had all been cut off to keep them away from a power line. It wasn't recent, and the leaves had grown up around the missing branches so that it didn't appear scarred. But from that angle, it looked like it had a huge bite taken out of it. It gave me that pang you sometimes get when you suddenly realize a person you've been talking to is missing a limb, or is blind.

*

The sudden rain from yesterday kept coming all night. It was enjoyable, despite the headache the low atmospheric pressure gave me. Summer rain can be such a relief. But we woke this morning to learn that overnight, dozens of people sleeping at a campground were swept away by rising rivers. Sixteen have been confirmed killed so far, many more missing. I'm quite familiar with the river; I swam in it during college and knew a lot of people who rafted and hiked in the same area that's currently being combed by rescue and recovery workers. It's fairly remote, hilly, with some deep washes and steep bluffs. It's beautiful and quiet.

...Until the water's rising freakishly fast and there are no radios or even a cell phone signal to get a warning to you, I'm sure some are thinking. I have a lot more to say about this, but I'll wait until this morning's events are less immediate.

Since I'm a weather nerd, it would be easy for me to use this project to just babble about weather. I intend to try to avoid that, mostly. However...

April turned over to May with two nights in a row of extensive severe storms and tornadoes all over the state. It was an exhausting two nights. In the end, the damage and death toll could have been much worse here, but the storm system continued east and later caused the Columbia River to flood Nashville. I'm hoping it's not an indicator of the rest of the spring storm season.

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I have long admired weather and nature diarists from times past. You know, those meticulous dead white dudes who would write down, every day, what the clouds were like in their corner of England, or on which day the first frost occurred in Pennsylvania, or when the robins were sighted for the first time. Not exciting reading at the time, but decades and centuries later, their writings can be mined for climate data and species behavior patterns. So maybe I'm thinking of that a little here, but mostly I think I just want to have a clear, simple task that records the things I notice all the time.