The first night of ice, the cracking started around 4 a.m. Freezing rain had attached to snow and burdened trees with beautiful dead weight.
In Summit and Midland, the first casualties woke us with a crack and a double thud.
The poplars that define property lines between small farms went first, surrendering their soft, brittle wood. Upright limbs, feathered with smaller branches, snapped and fell in a rush of loosed snow.
All over the county, fast-growing poplars, alders and aspens, planted as windbreaks, or as screens around golf courses or junk yards, shed themselves to pieces in the darkness.
As Thursday refused to brighten under freezing rain, broad laurel leaves attracted an inch of ice. Precipitation shifted to pellets, and snapping branches made neighborhoods sound like shooting ranges.
Then came the bigger trees. Firs that had been topped by storm or saw, or had grown slightly askew, began leaning and shedding branches. They menaced roofs, cars and power lines.
They proved the truth of the arborist’s creed: Plant the right tree in the right place.
They also proved the truth of the arborist’s secondary creed: Make sure your trees are in good shape before winter storms arrive.
And then they fell, taking power, phone and cable lines, and the comfort and joy of staying home in dangerous weather.
Our block dodged all that grief and left us to focus on the trees we lost.
Donald and Maryland Nagorski’s apple tree split in half, and their plum is in danger.
“It’s pulling itself out of the ground,” said their son, Matthias.
Still, that’s better than their new neighbor’s weeping willow.
Matthias heard cracking from Se Lautogia’s yard, hightailed it outside and saw a fourth of the tree take a dive toward the Ford Focus and the Jeep in the Nagorskis’ driveway.
It missed them both. It’s more than luck, he and his mom agree. He puts the miss down to providence.
I put the fall down to neighborhood tradition.
We had a weeping willow when we moved in 27 years ago. An ice storm did it in.
Se had one when he moved in last summer. An ice storm did it in.
We’re all out of willows now, which is a good thing, because they’re the sworn enemies of sidewalks and underground pipes.
All over the region, people are mourning better trees.
When I reached Ramie Pierce, the City of Tacoma’s arborist, and asked how she was, she replied: “Oh, crying for the trees. There’s so much damage.”
She’s learning of unsound, abused trees that failed, and dear, well-tended trees that did the same. Damage is harsh in Wright Park.
“It’s still beautiful despite the rain,” said Michael Clubb, who lives nearby. “But there are huge branches all over the ground. Poor trees. Some of them have become close friends to me during my daily meanderings. I hate to see them damaged.”
The story’s the same in Parkland’s park-like spaces, including Pacific Lutheran University.
“Huge branches down,” said Diane Harney, a professor there. “There is no clear path across upper campus. Add to that the falling ice and it is treacherous.”
And those trees are well tended.
Elsewhere, many fallen evergreens were damaged in the ice storm of 1996, Pierce said. That storm topped them, weakening them with rot and poor growth for the rest of their lives.
Some were never meant to be here.
“Evergreen magnolias,” Pierce said. “Those things are not adapted to snow, versus madrona and rhodies that tilt their leaves down so the snow can fall off.”
I will inform our front-yard rhodies, which seem not to have gotten the memo. Nor have I told them what happened Friday morning, some 30 feet south.
At 4 a.m. on the second night of ice, I heard what sounded like an animal scrabbling at the side of our house under the bedroom window.
Then came the crash. The sky was so white, we could see our favorite overgrown shrub splayed between two cherry trees. Home to generations of chickadees and bush tits, it had shaded bedrooms upstairs and down.
Now it’s gone, and we are realizing how much we loved it, and took it for granted.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677 kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/street
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