As long as we're catching up...

The week we left for Las Vegas (last October), the old-growth maple in our back yard gave up the ghost and fell on the house.  A huge clattering and scratchy racket awakened us at 3:30 in the morning.  Still clouded by the illogic of full REM sleep, I first thought the noise was Kenai (our Anatolian Shepherd dog) chasing a coyote across the back of the house and roof.  Operating in an adrenaline-driven, dreamy waking, I ran to the living room to get out the back slider into the yard and calm the fuss.  Only, I could not open the slider.

Still clouded, and not sure why I couldn't slide open the back door, I ran to and out of the side door.  The night was relatively warm and calm, the ground sopping wet with a type of rain we in the Pacific Northwest refer to as "fog drip."  Certainly there were none of the typical weather markers for conditions that typically drop trees out here.  Yet there it lay.  Our 100+ year-old maple tree had fallen on the house.

On the one hand, an event like this one is always a surprise when it happens, and the lack of stormy conditions amplified the surprise.  On the other hand, I had been ogling our leafy beast for a couple of years now, wondering in which direction it would fall when it did.  This was a tree with four-come-three major trunks (the fourth was knocked off some 10 years ago when the neighbor's sitka spruce uprooted in a proper northwest windstorm and fell into our yard).  So yes, I fully expected this night to happen, just not this night.

My first reaction to seeing the tree on the house was amplified panic; full-on fight or flight.  I ran half-clothed to get my chainsaw, and tried to climb the ladder onto the roof before Angela grabbed me and talked some sense.  "But I have to get it off the roof before it crushes the house!" was my brave, dimwitted reply.  "No. It's down, it hasn't crushed the house, so it won't.  Let's call the fire department and find out what they recommend." 

I hate the fire department.  None of those guys is gnarlier than me.  Yet to a man, they're all tall and handsome, and so goddamn friendly and helpful.  And yes, they were a big help.  The young buck couldn't wait to crawl around the attic in full bunking gear to inspect the roof and rafters.  The chief; the guy that drives the suburban and the one dude that actually resembled me, layed down some process for us and arranged a city inspection.  When it happened later that morning, the inspection was a positive event in that the house was deemed habitable.

Most importantly, I managed to get a friend who happens to be a contractor over the house and he had his tree guy on the job by mid-morning.  By mid-afternoon the tree was on the ground, bucked and limbed, and my contractor buddy was back to tarp off the portion of the roof that was punctured in several spots.

With the tree off the house, I was able to determine that the full meat of the main trunk struck the house mid-slider, just above the header.  The header for a 12-foot sliding glass door being a very big piece of wood, absorbed the brunt of the fall and spared us the tree slicing through our house like a katana through a straw omote cutting target.  But it would have to be replaced along with the door, several rafters, and some siding ruined by puncturing limbs.  One such spot included a limb that broke off at the side of our master bedroom after puncturing the roof overhang there.  Had it not, it would have plunged into our bed causing worse than dream-wracked panic.

This week, roofing and repairs began.  And with that, I set about restoring the back yard minus the respected elder, carrying and stacking his heavy pieces to our woodpile.  And feeling pretty gnarly about it.