It's Never The One You Expect

There is an old racing adage which states it's never the big crashes you have to worry about it. The logic behind the saying is that racecars are designed to disintegrate and lose energy, so when you see them flipping 50 times while being ripped to shreds that is exactly how they are expected to perform and the driver should walk away; it is when they hit the wall and stop suddenly that people end up getting hurt. Basically, the worse it looks, the safer it probably is. It is the same thing which happens in other sports as well - the really horrific collisions rarely result in catastrophic injury, whereas the guy who wasn't even touched ends up tearing his Achilles and cutting his season short. I was thinking about this the other day as I found myself outside during a thunderstorm, cutting up a tree. Allow me to explain.

There is a tree in the front of the yard which I am 75% sure is dead. It is fairly mangled and while one or two branches produce leaves, for the most part it doesn't show many signs of life. After we lost a different tree in the front yard following a storm last winter I began preparing myself for this tree to randomly fall in a similar fashion. Therefore, when storms which produced deadly tornadoes ripped through the state of Massachusetts two weeks ago, I thought that would be the end of that tree. The way the weathermen were tracking the storms as they approached I half expected the tree to cut itself down to save everybody the time. Turns out, I was wrong and it survived the storms without any problems.

Then at the end of last week we had a much smaller, much weaker line of storms come through. Compared to the tornado-producing storms, these lines of showers got far less news coverage and much less hype. So, you can imagine my surprise when I looked out my window to see that a much larger, much healthier tree from the other side of the yard had snapped in half and was now laying across the driveway. There hadn't been nearly as much rain, barely any wind and I hadn't heard a sound and yet there it was, blocking anyone from getting in or out.

A closer inspection revealed it had snapped a few feet off the ground. Like I said there hadn't been any big gusts of wind and even if there had been the tree was surrounded by other trees on all sides, so I'm wondering if it was struck by lighting. Anyway, I was going to let it stay there until the storm was over, but that wasn't going to be for a while and people need to use the driveway, so at first I just tried to drag it out of the way. However, you may be shocked to learn that I can't drag 60 feet of tree anywhere.

So in the middle of this thunderstorm we had to head out there with my trusty Gator and at least cut the top half of the tree down to the point cars could go up and down the driveway. Again, this was easier said than done because the Gator can only fit so much between its claws. It is not designed to cut through entire trees and the trunk of this tree was very thick. Still, it performed admirably, got the driveway clear and we were able to retreat back inside before the next line of powerful storms got too close. Meanwhile, the mostly dead tree wasn't even swaying in the breeze.

Let this be a lesson to us all: when you're too busy concentrating on one specific thing you can be totally blindsided by something from the other side which you never saw coming. Oh, and don't ask me about trees, because clearly I have no idea whether a tree is in great shape or about to collapse.