Montana, Yard Notes, July 31

"Expect the Unexpected"

Field notes are more fun to write, but this has been a week about my yard.

Expect the unexpected.

It is a mantra I’ve had for the last few decades. You just never know what is around the corner. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes it’s just a pain in the back.

Last week I went for a run on a trail I often hit in the summer. The trailhead is just a few minutes in the car up the road. The trail is about an hour and ten minute loop with some options to add on if I’m feeling up to it, up through a dense section of trail that typically stays about 10-15 degrees cooler than the rest of Missoula, emerging on a nice overlook ridge with a nice winding slope down through the woods for the next 30 minutes or so. It had been hot out but on my way to the trail I noticed something sneaky in the smokey skies… the distinct shape of some clouds in the light gray blur that had taken over our skies the last week. This was not altogether unusual except that my weather app had said nothing about clouds what so ever. Our forecast was for severe clear (except in smoke) and hot, and dry. But there, hidden behind a layer of dense smoke, the distinct edges of clouds and even a slight dark gray on the evening edge of the western horizon. Mentally I noted it.

My run was nice. The temperature was hot, but after descending back into the valley I walked over to the creek near the trailhead and sat in the cold water for 10 minutes before driving home.

Then on the drive home something very unexpected. The southwestern horizon was now dark. Very dark. There was no mistaking, a storm was coming from the southwest. This helped prove without doubt that the weather apps are only so good. Those earlier clouds were letting us know how wrong predictions can be. As I drove home, I shot a short video and a photo of the clouds, just so I could remember them later. I even said out loud to myself, “holy shit, something is coming.”

I’ve seen a lot of storms that have a far more insidious appearance, but this one had an invisible but felt quality that my gut was fully aware was about to wreak havoc. And it did.

I’ve seen the front edge of a lot of storms. As a lookout I was front and center on dozens over the course of several summers. There are no absolutes or complete consistencies in ascertaining how powerful a storm will be when it passes. Some very ominous looking storms fall flat. Some that look tame from a distance increase overhead and drop violence in wild unexpected tantrums overhead. Visuals are deceiving. But, there is one factor that I struggle to even explain, except that I’ve gotten to know it through experience alone. It definitely involves the color of a storm, but also a softness in sound and in the feel of the air, and more than just about anything, it is a feel to the air. As I drove home from that run with the windows down, I felt it. Enough that I said the words out loud and even took a photo, just to remember it. It’s not terribly dramatic, not a beautiful or epic photo, but the storm that followed was exceptionally dramatic and for that reason, I’ll always remember this photo. It was taken on feel, with the purpose of remembering the feel, not visual.

It was about 30 minutes later it hit. Ella had just left for a walk on the hill. I’d told her I thought she might want a jacket. That something was about to hit. A light breeze was beginning to pick up and the gray was getting thicker. Within 15 minutes the sky was dark, not because of sunset, but from thickness of clouds. A mass was moving in overhead. Trees were beginning to sway about. Lightening began shattering the sky, mostly cloud to cloud, spreading in long electric lines from horizon to horizon. The cracks from the flashes of light were immediate. No few seconds between. Just lighting over and over again overhead. I’m not good at going in doors for storms, so I went with my 15 year old to the porch to watch. Wind storms are not uncommon here. This is life in the mountains. Pave it all you want (honestly it makes it worse). Add businesses. More homes. More structures. More human sophistication. But at the end of the day, this is a tiny valley in an enormous range of mountains. I think people forget that. You only necessarily realize it if you’ve been up high. If you’ve flown over, or hung out on mountain tops where you can see the endless sea of mountains that makes up this inland ocean of granite. And mountains, like the ocean, make some insane and unpredictable weather from time to time.

Trees began swaying dangerously. A few crashes could be heard from across the road. Trees were beginning to fall. A few loud pops as power transformers blew up. A lot of trees were beginning to fall. I ran from the front of the house to the back to see. Then back to the front. The lightening crashes grew louder, and somehow closer. Ella called and was racing back to her car with Acre. A storm of dust and lightning seemed to be descending on her. I was a little jealous I wasn’t out on the open hillside with her, but recognized this is a better storm to be near structures, maybe? At this point I’m not sure I’ve seen wind this strong in the valley before. Certainly in the mountain tops, but not down here.

A sudden crack and crash alerted me that something significant had happened in the back yard. Simon and I raced to the back door again to look. A 150+ year old ponderosa pine that had lived happily through several generations of humans since Lewis & Clark had broken off 40 feet up, snapped like a small twig and flown into my yard, bringing with it a protective spruce that had only just a few years ago lost it’s top. Both lay sleepily and peacefully in my yard as the storm continued above, and the top of the ponderosa had missed our house by less than three feet. (Our house has been struck by three trees in the last couple years, so this was a great relief!)

We ran back to the front. The wind seemed to be increasing. Looking at where my truck was parked I realized it was at risk of another neighbors spruce that was toddling back and forth like a metronome in the wind. I grabbed my keys and moved it to relative safety.

The wind lasted another twenty minutes before it began to calm. Later reports would put it at 80 mph in the valley and over 100 mph on the mountain tops. Over 1000 trees down in Missoula. Countless more damaged with broken limbs. Power for a large portion of the city was out. We got in the truck and drove around to assess the city, check on friends and family houses, and see the overall damage. In a rare, and eerily beautiful scene, almost all of the downtown Missoula was dark after sunset, with only a small few blocks miraculously maintaining power. I’ve not seen the city dark since a storm took out the mainline from the Grand Coulee dam back in 1996 (?) and all of Missoula went dark overnight. There is something spectacular and novel to seeing a city go black. An unprecedented quiet emerges.

Back at home, things were not settling. While the neighborhood homes all lacked power, the power lines did not. From our house we could see electricity jumping and arching between lines in multiple places. Weird red flashes jumping around. The sound of crackling. We’d just finished a couple weeks of 100 degree days and very hot nights. Anyone from Montana or the intermountain west knows this is when fire conditions are their ripest. And then flames suddenly emerged in the pine limbs that were entangled in the fallen power lines. Open flames in trees that connected via canopy just 30 feet from a tree over the house. The makings of a neighborhood fire were well underway.

I called the fire department. It could be a while, they warned me. Logic told me to not spray water on the fire, and a half hour later the fire department confirmed they would not be able to do anything either until the power was shut off from the lines. We all stared as the flames jumped from the lines into the trees and small flareups burst in light and then settled again. One of the firemen got off the phone and told me the energy company would likely not be able to get to the neighborhood until the next day at earliest. A series of high voltage cross country lines had gone down and would be getting priority. What is the protocol? I asked. If the trees catch and move to your house, you get out, he said. There is nothing else to be done. I went to the house and figured out what exactly I’d want out.

This in itself is an interesting exercise to think through. For me, the list consisted of a few bookcase rows of journals I’ve written over the course of my life, a safe with our not impossible, but challenging to deal with paper work, and my photo hard drive. (For this very reason I periodically save everything and take it to either work or a family members house for safe keeping… I recently backed up so was less concerned about this aspect.) And while it would be tragic and a pain to lose everything else, those are the things that simply can’t be replaced. Gear, cloths, goods… all easily replaceable. Kids art and writing… not so much.

My truck loaded with a few simple things, my family went to bed while I stayed up for hours walking between our house and a few houses down where the flames were even more prominent. While the neighbors had all drifted back to bed, I couldn’t sleep knowing the trees had a potential to burst into flames really at any moment. But perhaps miraculously, they never did. The power of watering trees is that they do not just burst into flames. This situation outside an urban area would certainly have produced a crown fire. But here the flames died out, though the lines kept buzzing. I laid a sleeping bag out on the front porch where I could keep an eye on the tree over my garage and would be alerted by sound should something break out, and around 3 am drifted to sleep until my daughter stepped over me at 6 am on her way to work.

I’d had plans for the weekend that involved camping and cameras. A few shoots I wanted to get done, as well as just spend some time out of town. All that changed with the enormous entanglement of tree in the yard. The power remained live through the day and into the next day when I finally saw an energy truck and flagged the driver down to ask him when the power might get shut off for the line wrapped around my back yard. He came and assessed and was on the phone the next minute giving priority to the mess in my backyard. Without that line getting fixed, no one in the area would get power. And the line was very much still alive. (We’d avoided the yard, and kept Acre out of it as well, not knowing, but assuming it was still live even though the arching had quit.)

Now a week later, most of the brush is cleared, though I still have the enormous tree bodies to deal with. Not having a wood stove, this is wood for years of backyard fires and camping, but hopefully will find a home for it all. My back is all sorts of out-of-sorts. At 50, I over did it a little, something my family is happy to give me grief over. I don’t have a slow switch when it comes to this sort of clean up. I don’t like a mess. So I’m limping here for a few days until my back gets straightened out, but I love a good push, I love a good project, and don’t regret that I leaned into it. It’s important to know your edge. I found my physical one this last week. But it felt good.

And the point of all this? This is life. Life is not tame. The world is not tamed. There are countless things that happen beyond our control and expectation. Expect it. How we move through it is all we can control. How we react. How we go forward. You can never know what is around the corner. You can never know when a storm will emerge out of no where, no matter how good the information age thinks it is. You can never know just how it will hit. Expect the unexpected, and then go forward. Not in fear. Not in trepidation. Just in knowledge that there is so much moving forward that we don’t know. There is so much we think we know that we are wrong about. The creators within the information age want us to believe they have mastered the world, tamed it, but they haven’t. We haven’t. The world is still wild and unpredictable, and in this there remains mystery, and within the mystery, beauty.

Sometimes the unexpected is bad. Sometimes it is good. And sometimes, it really has nothing to do with good/bad value judgement, it simply is.

I like a good project. Even if my back does not. My back did not like this project, but I nearly have the yard cleared, and with it, my mind.