Winter is usually the time of year around here when I get take a break and rest. Shorter days. Cooler temps. Warm fires. Goodies in the oven.
I'm always running around here like a chicken with my head cut off in the summer. Always trying to put twenty pounds of taters in a five pound sack, kinda because I have to. Long days. Hot as hell. The constant noise of pushing air. And no goodies in the oven.
A big part of that busy summer equation is our own doing. I love to garden and my lovely wife is the cut flower queen.
So we have roses, lots of roses. We also have several 3x8 grow boxes devoted entirely to cut flowers, which, besides my lovely wife, bees and butterflies love too. Then there's two twenty foot long strips along walk ways that get planted with bloomers every year. And a ten foot lily strip along the potting shed. Hundreds of iris bulbs all over the property and flowers in pots kinda everywhere too.
This is a typical kitchen table scene during spring and summer as they await deployment all over the house:
Then there's the rest of the stuff. Vegetables, a dozen fruit trees and assorted landscaping close to and all around the house. Most everything is at least drought tolerant as far as the landscaping goes. But it still needs some attention. Especially during many of those hot hot hot summer days.
I have drip systems everywhere with eight or nine automatic timers. A timed sprinkler system in front. I've done what I can to minimize usage while keeping things alive, but there's still a lot to do.
It wasn't so bad a decade ago, but with the hot as hell summers now I gotta stay on top of things. And I've kind of got a part time gig, which busy season happens to coincide with summer. Summer is hot and busy as hell. I'll take the shorter winter days anytime.
So just to interrupt and screw with my idyllic winter rest this year we had a major storm event here right after Christmas, 2021. We are calling it Snowmageddon. And Snowmageddon begat the Treepocalypse. And the Treepocalypse begat an enormous, time consuming mess.
You see, here in the Sierra Nevada mountains, even in the foothills we get this snow we refer to as Sierra Cement. It is very wet and heavy stuff. Not like the fine powder many folks prefer to ski on. Or put up their nose.
Nah, you could bury corrupt politicians and supreme court justices under this stuff. At least until spring. Then I don't know what you're going to do. Those suckers will surface and start stinking, similar to what they're doing today only from a slightly different perspective.
Put a few inches to feet of Sierra Cement on top of drought stricken trees and you get the Treepocalypse.
That morning, December 27th I awoke to the lovely quiet. It had snowed overnight. It was a winter wonderland. We missed a White Christmas by two days. Dang.
It's what I've always been dreaming of.
We had no power, which was no big deal. It also added to the quiet. It would only take me a few minutes or so to run some extension cords and fire up the generator.
I stoked the wood stove. I had no idea hell was waiting outside until our son called about 7:00 AM.
He said he had about thirty down trees on his ten acres, with at least ten across his drive, which is about three hundred yards long. He said it was very scary outside because big widow maker branches were breaking and falling everywhere.
It was then I got entirely attired for snow and started to wander around our property. I quickly began to
understand the magnitude of the situation. This is what I encountered on our driveway after just a few steps:
A little stroll down to the street greeted me with this:
That's our driveway gate up yonder. There's another downed tree across the drive behind it. It was only about four or five inches of snow, but obviously that was enough to create a situation. And I had situations everywhere.
The above situation is what our tree guy Mike, the mess maker (530-575-2251) made when he took down those (there were three total) large, broken branches. Everything landed between the potting shed and house.
Mike's been doing our sensitive tree work for years now. He has never been off an inch from where he's wanted wood to fall. See Tarzan the Tree Man. (That there's a link to another wonderful post by the way. )
I highly recommend him for any locals in Nevada County that would like a mess made on their own front lawn. He's bonded and insured and all that. You can tell him I sent ya. He'll probably charge more.
The only downed oak (above) not affecting ingress, egress or safety. It was a favorite of ours and home every year to an assortment of nesting birds.
Then there was this monster that partially landed on the hen house. Fortunately it took down a smaller pine, slowing it's descent. Only one rafter and a portion of the overhang in the rear were damaged.
The other side. As you can see, I had already been doing some cutting and slicing.
One thing I have learned through much experience is that trees always get bigger when they hit the ground. If it was a small to medium tree, it gets big. If it was big to begin with, well, it gets diabolically huge. Trust me.
We had a total of seven diabolically huge trees come down here on our property, three across the drive. Sigh. I'm getting too old for this stuff.
Once I had assessed the situation and realized I had about eleven thousand things to do, I figured I had better start with the first. Which was get the generator fired up and the appropriate extension cords run.
I also have a transfer switch on the well so that our generator will power it, but unfortunately a pipe broke and I was going to have to fix that prior to getting water to the house. But the generator was on. We had communication and charging capabilities.
As I mentioned, we heat the house with a wood stove, so heat was not an issue. And there was plenty of seasoned wood. We also have lamps, lanterns, candles and enough assorted batteries for a six month siege.
I also always have enough propane on hand to run the generator for sixty-four hours, or four to five days at twelve to sixteen hours per day. We'd be OK til the dust settled. Or the snow melted, in this case.
I don't even want to get into the end of the world pantry. I was a cub scout when I was a kid. I've always taken being prepared to heart. We had food for months. It'd get a little weird after a while, like tuna and peanut butter sandwiches, but we wouldn't be starving.
My celebrated mother-in-law was still here from Christmas, and my lovely wife's tantalizing twin was coming up that night.
She was coming up for an after Christmas couple day visit and then she was going to take Mom back to the Bay Area. After conversing with my lovely wife she decided to rent a 4WD, which I thought was a dandy idea. If our place was this much of a mess the county as a whole couldn't be much better off.
Bolstered with one of my patented edibles, I began what was to become a very long and arduous day for an aging old man. I had a hundred yard drive to shovel and three diabolically huge downed trees to get out of the way. Just to get to the road.
Who knew what lay beyond that?
I forgot to mention in early December, three weeks prior, I cracked a rib. It was the same area I Skewered My Spleen back in 2020.
We had just returned from a live Christmas matinee dance deal loosely based on "The Polar Express" with our grand kids and I was out on the front deck.
I had been nursing a non-covid cough for a couple days. We felt strongly enough about it though that I did get tested prior to the matinee and massive public exposure. I tested negative so we were good to go. Which we did. With our grand kids. To the show.
Hi-ho.
So I was out on the deck and I coughed, real hard apparently, because I heard a loud snap.
Another thing I have learned (unfortunately) through a bit of experience is that whenever you hear some part of your body snap it's usually not a good thing. Generally intense pain is right on the heels of that snap, within milliseconds I reckon. And then your body reacts, and depending on the location of that snap you could end up pernt near anywhere. Doing anything.
Like the Watusi for instance.
I usually end up on my ass. One thing was for certain, I was NOT doing the Watusi. Nor was I contemplating any other dance for that matter.
No. I was down on my knees in a second. Which coincides with both my above time frame reckoning's by the way.
It took my breath away, that snap, and I almost puked. So there I sat, on my knees, which doesn't make sense, for a minute. My lovely wife was napping and the grand kids were watching the real "Polar Express" on TV.
I was gasping. Then I wheezed. Eventually I sighed. After a minute or so I was finally able to get up. I shuffled into the kitchen where I freaking coughed again.
And again I went down. But this time I could not get back up. The pain was too intense, it was beyond mere numbers. But if I had to guess, it was somewhere in the hundreds.
If I didn't move I was OK. But movement in any direction was excruciating. I was down on my side for about five minutes, contemplating my dilemma, gasping and wheezing.
I didn't want to alarm anyone, but I seriously thought we were going to have to call the fire department. I could not move. It was so alarming I started to giggle. Which made it hurt more. I was screwed.
I used to be one of those firefighter type rescue guys. It was a lot more fun on that side of the situation. Plus you weren't the person in the dilemma. Less pain too.
I didn't want to be the dilemma. I didn't want to be in pain. At all. I'm not that kind of guy and I certainly do not need the attention. Quite the contrary.
And that might have been the deciding moment, I did not want to be a dilemma. Cause then there's a whole bunch of hoopla and hoody-hoo and I'd just prefer not. Not for this.
Nah, let's wait until I'm dangling from a cliff, lop off a limb or have a bonafide hangnail before we engage the cavalry.
I excruciatingly maneuvered my torso to a sit up stage, then I was able to stand, gasping, wincing and wheezing all the way. Boy howdy, it was a doozy.
As I reflect on this misery, what I find a little concerning was this injury wasn't incurred doing something really macho, like log splitting. Or playing rugby or Parcheesi.
Nope. I coughed. That's it.
If this is how this body aging thing is going to roll I could be concerned. But then that's one more thing I'd have to pay attention to and I've already got enough to do.
I eat proper. I take supplements. I'm in reasonably decent shape. I get a shit house howdy ton of exercise around here, too much sometimes. Cardio and otherwise. Yes, I could be stretching more, but how do you properly exercise your rib cage?
It's weird being the same age as an old person. And this aging thing is not for sissies. I can't tell ya how many aches and pains I constantly got going on.
Great. Now I sound like a bunch of old folks conversing around the dinner table. In three part harmony. Which is also weird. I don't sing.
My lovely wife took me to the ER the next morning. I mean, I could only sleep in the supine position, and getting there took some yoga like maneuvers, which I don't have. Because I don't stretch.
So I looked (and felt) more like a jerky, uncoordinated, spazzy old robot than a silky smooth, ice skating gymnast when I simply endeavored to lay down. It was a process. And not pretty.
I knew there was nothing they could do at the ER, I'd been down the rib injury road before. But we went just in case, got x-ray'd and officially Covid tested since I was still coughing. (I tested negative again.)
The X-ray was also negative for any fracture, but ribs typically show that way. It didn't matter, the Doc knew straight away my ribs were injured just by the way I was sitting. A rigidly convoluted and unorthodox pose positioned perfectly so as to allow minimum stress to the affected region. Which had to look weird and as uncomfortable as hell to anyone else. It was almost comical.
He gave me the spiel, six weeks heal time, nothing they can do, just like a broken toe, blah, blah, blah.
It had been three weeks by the time Snowmageddon occurred, and although the Doc said it would take six I was doing really good. Let me tell you something though, which should be pretty obvious to any thinking person; shoveling Sierra Cement and running a chain saw are NOT conducive towards positive healing of an injured rib, or of an injured anything for that matter. By the end of that day they should have taken me out back and shot me.
Fortunately our darling daughter called in the early mid-morning. Her and her very capable fiance, along with a not so motivated teenager were coming to the rescue. An extra snow shovel, an extra chain saw, and extra hands. And without them I would have never made it.
They got here mid-morning, and by that time I had cleared one tree from the very bottom of the drive. I had also managed to shovel out two tracks so they could get up the steepest part of the drive and stop on a fairly level landing. It was touchy though, even with 4WD. Our driveway is steep at the road.
They spent a good four hours here and helped clear two more trees and shovel the rest of the way up. Her fiance also had the necessary pvc fittings to fix the well so that I didn't have to go to the hardware store, which wasn't open anyway. I'd been so focused on survival in our little corner of the universe I hadn't really given the outside world much of a thought.
Trees were down EVERYWHERE. At least thirty or forty just on our little six mile country road. And we're not talking small taters either. A couple down the road were Swiss Family Robinson type deals with three foot trunks. Carpet and linoleum too.
My fabulous sister-in-law had to drive around one of them that had at least been cut to facilitate a one lane passage. By a local for sure.
(Local here is referring to anyone living near an area of impact that gets involved with said impact, usually in a positive manner.)
The county was overwhelmed. Hell, half the people that work for them probably couldn't get to work that morning. Many, like me, had hours of work ahead of them just to get to the road.
State Hwy 49 was blocked for half the day. That's the main highway in and out of town. And it was blocked by downed trees for hours!
The county and state had to start with the arteries and work their way down. For the time being, many smaller, blocked public roads were being taken care of by "locals". And neighbors were checking on neighbors, especially in the days that followed.
The city and county were a mess. For days. Power was out everywhere. It was like a bomb went off. Thousands of trees came crashing down on power lines everywhere, splintering many poles in the process.
Over the course of the next couple days city infrastructure and commercial establishments slowly came to life. The first stores to open did so with generator power.
We got our power back after six days, and I feel very fortunate. It took two weeks for our son to get his power back, and some folks were out for almost a full month. Folks with gas generators were spending fifty bucks a day for power. (This was more than a month before the Ukraine War and the recent price spike.)
Once things semi got back to normal, it was clean-up time. I had to turn a whole bunch of this
Into this:
And it had to be done toot sweet because of the fire danger. Fire season seems to be almost ever ending around here anymore.
Twelve burn piles and about one hundred extra hours I never knew I had later I'm almost caught up. For some really inane reason, at a time in my life when I should really be lazing about in a hammock, I'm really, really busy instead.
And that type of work; land clearing, cutting, hauling and burning is the hardest work you can do out here in the country. You definitely utilize every single muscle group in the process, with a lot of extra extra cardio living on a hill.
Who needs a gym when you own a couple acres?
Happy spring y'all.
