Some thoughts after Sandy (the hurricane, of course)

This morning I took a walk, one of several since Hurricane Sandy blew through our area on Monday. The weather proved quite chilly, with a blustery wind blowing out of the north or northwest (I only know general directions from star-watching). As I set out the sky showed more clouds than blue, forming long parallel bands which looked a bit like luminous icing under a late-morning sun. A number of trees, having lost their leaves by now, crackled and snapped in the wind.

Even now, the clean-up from the hurricane continues. Our neighborhood received much rain, though I suspect the wind proved the more destructive element (at least in this immediate vicinity) this go around. I was struck that, for every 10 fallen trees I observed along my way, at least 9 of them were some form of evergreen. I haven't a clue why this is, but one hypothesis might involve the way evergreens catch and hold the wind in their upper branches. 

Consider: The force of a lever (if I remember the physics aright...a dubious proposition) is equal to the ratio of the distance between the applied force and the fulcrum, or the point on which a lever pivots, such that the further away from the fulcrum a force is applied the higher the resulting (and opposite) force will be. With an evergreen tree, the point at which the most force might be applied is at its top, since that is the point furthest from the fulcrum, which from observation appears to be somewhere about its roots. So my hypothesis contends that if the evergreen tree somehow catches and holds the wind without letting it blow through its branches (as other trees seemed to do during the storm), it might be said that the resulting lever could (and did) prove strong enough to pry up those trees from the ground. As mentioned this is what I observed almost universally so far as fallen evergreens were concerned: they did not snap in the middle or at some other point, but fell over completely intact from their roots. We might contrast this to the way deciduous trees fell over, which primarily involved a snap or break of a major branch in the middle or some other among the periphery. In no cases did I find a non-evergreen fall over complete intact from the roots. Of course I could also have it all wrong.

 

I hoped that the temperature would get warmer as today's walk continued, but alas the opposite seemed to happen. The cloud bands mentioned earlier seemed to smudge together after about an hour, resulting in less sunlight and perhaps more wind. In the forest, the stands of Tulip Poplars by the stream were completely bare of leaves, and the water in an adjacent pond proved dark and rippled from the wind. For a time I observed a dead poplar tree, whose bark seemed to have sheared off in long pieces like the skin of a shedding snake. I found a great deal of bark along the trail leading from the stream up to the top of a ridge in fact, but do not know if it was there before or after the storm passed through. A right mystery it is.

Since the wind seemed to get worse by the minute, I turned for home after that. The journey back proved uneventful, except for a rusty saw I found lying haphazardly on a curb. It didn't bite me, thankfully. 

I'm hopeful that everyone is recovering from the storm in good order. On the other hand, it is gratifying to see and read about people and institutions doing so much to keep the business of society going. Disasters are, well, disastrous. But they also tend to bring out, for better and worse, the extraordinary in those involved. Sometimes that involves things like looting, but other times it involves gallant rescues and charitable actions. For a brief moment at least life becomes less about getting our's so much as getting everyone through in one piece. Priorities change, and frequently whatever measure of liberality we possess comes finds its way to the fore. What a curious creature we humans are.

Happy Saturday, friends :)