A Tree Falls in Sodus

Trees. Tall, majestic, often towering over everything around them. Beautiful. Some even produce fruit or nuts. All provide shade in the summer but many need their leaves raked in the fall. I think one of the great smells in life is the distinctively pungent, smoky, aroma of burning leaves.

Often spring storms will split branches or even topple large trees, ripping down power lines and landing on cars or houses, sometimes tragically crushing to death anyone inside.

Even so, property with only a house but no trees seems somehow naked. Bare. Incomplete.

Fifty years ago I grew up in a new subdivision in which the trees were new, too, if there were any at all. Most of the then recently cleared land was still bare. There were only three houses on our new street, all brand new. New lawns were landscaped to gently slope toward the new street, channeling rainfall away from new basements. Flowers and shrubs were planted as well as saplings, usually two in the front yard, evenly spaced between the driveway and the opposite property line. Well manicured.

When Carol and I married in 1972 our first house was a rental in residential Benton Harbor, Michigan, which had several old trees that were very large, two right next to the house. We lived there for about two years but suffered no tree damage from storms. We never even gave that a thought.

Our next house was also a rental, out in the country a few miles north in nearby Riverside, that surprisingly had no trees at all. This was a new experience for us, and although not a major deal, it was something we both missed. We lived there for a little under two years.

Then we moved a few miles further north to Lake Michigan Beach and our third rental house which had a yard full of old, large, trees. By then we had a newborn as well as a desire to own our own place. We knew that any house we might buy would have to come with plenty of trees as well.

It was May, 1976, the bicentennial year, and our union at Whirlpool was on strike, forcing me out of work. I managed to get another job at Stanley Knight, a small factory in New Troy over an hour's drive away to the south, that fabricated stainless steel tables and food display units for restaurants.

Overtime pay there was exactly the same as straight time pay at Whirlpool, $5.55/hour, so it took some convincing that I would not return to Whirlpool when the strike was over before Stanley Knight agreed to hire me. No one wanted to hire Whirlpool strikers. They made too much money and had a reputation for not wanting to work.

After a couple of months of searching we found an old farm house we liked and could afford. It was out in the country, it had plenty of character, an unattached garage and a barn, open fields on both sides and woods across the street. And although in Sodus, it was listed in the Eau Claire school district.

It also came with plenty of large trees of its own, over twenty of them on 1¼ acres.

So while one guy I heard about lost his house while we were on strike, we managed to buy ours.

Along nearly the entire length of our western property line was a row of nine old trees, tall and full, which provided shade almost all the way to our house. Our front yard, facing south, had three walnut trees which littered our yard with walnuts by the hundreds every fall. We also had a Bartlett pear tree, a hazelnut tree, and a plum tree, which gave us plums only one year out of the next 35, the only way we even knew it was a plum tree. What a surprise that was.

But towering over them all was one tree, two feet from our front porch. With a girth of three feet and a height over sixty feet it dominated our skyline so that 80% of our yard was always in the shade.

That tree was a Kentucky Coffee tree. The last to get leaves in the spring and the first to lose them in the fall, it produced six inch long pods that were full of beans that were toxic until roasted, but then could be used as a substitute for coffee beans. From 1976 until 1994 it was even the state tree of Kentucky. Our particular tree had been planted by the father of a little girl when they were living here. She recently died at the age of 97, dating both my house and that tree at about 100 years old. For us, that tree was our most important tree, a Goliath among giants.

Sodus was not that much closer to New Troy than Lake Michigan Beach was, so my bosses at Stanley Knight became a little suspicious and asked if I really planned to stay with them. Despite my assurances, when our strike ended a month later I immediately quit and returned to Whirlpool. But there was no future for me at Stanley Knight which they proved a couple of years later when they closed up.

Over the ensuing years we experienced first hand the havoc strong winds could wreak on older trees that had never been properly pruned. Lower branches that had not been removed from the trunks of saplings eventually grew into huge branches as heavy as some smaller trees themselves, coming off of the trunk almost parallel to the ground before arching skyward. Most of our trees were like that, with branches that had sprouted at the five foot level or even lower reaching lengths of twenty or thirty feet or more. All of that imbalanced weight made them susceptible to breakage due to high winds.

Surprisingly, these branches rarely broke due to heavy snow or ice. Even the cold didn't seem to make them brittle. During one howling blizzard in January, 1978, the air was so cold, nearly -25° with a wind chill about -75°, that the fuel oil in the copper line between our outside tank and our basement gelled and stopped flowing, which shut off our furnace. I trudged through waist deep snow, dug out the line with my hands, and with a small hand held propane torch warmed it enough to make the fuel oil inside it flow again. Good thing, too, since we didn't see a snowplow down our road for three days. The volunteer fire department came by on snowmobiles checking houses and taking orders for the tiny local Sodus IGA. We actually had some groceries delivered to us that way.

We parked our cars in the winter backed in at the end of our driveway so I wouldn't have to shovel so much. Once while working on my car trying to get it to start I heard a snowplow coming, so I closed the hood and got in. He practically buried me inside as he passed by. After struggling to get out, I cleaned off my car and continued to work under the hood until I fixed what was wrong. Such was life.

But no trees fell and no branches broke off, and our electricity stayed on the whole time.

Our power was more likely to go out in the spring. The winds wouldn't really be higher, but the leaves caught them more. Lightning strikes did their part, too. Tall trees are natural lightning rods.

There were no power lines near my western tree line which acted like a wall against the prevailing winds. But after twenty-five years the taller these trees grew the easier it became for larger branches to snap off. Every couple of years or so one would crash down just short of our driveway. It usually took me a day or two after work to chainsaw it into pieces small enough to carry to the edge of our property next to that tree line where I would leave them to rot. That took years, and I always seemed to add more faster than the old ones rotted away. We never ran out of wood for summer bonfires.

That Kentucky Coffee tree was different, though. Its trunk was intact with no branches from the ground up at least twenty feet. Only then did they appear and spread out over our house. Yet over the years virtually none of them ever broke off. That tree seemed indestructible.

One May day in 2003 I was in my car at lunchtime at work when some severe straight line winds hit which buffeted my car and almost lifted it off the ground. I watched as wooden pallets stacked outside were blown up one side of the shop and across the roof and dumped on the other side. Carol happened to be driving our Saturn on the Bypass at that moment and the cross wind almost blew her off the road. She was scared to death. But only a couple of our smaller branches broke off.

The following Memorial Day in 2004 during an electrical storm a huge branch crashed down that nearly reached my driveway. It again took me most of the day with a chainsaw to clean it up.

In April of 2006 a lightning strike nearly exploded our plum tree. One of its branches took out the electrical ground line to our house which caused a power surge that knocked out our refrigerator and TV, but fortunately caused no fire.

In July of 2008 another severe storm knocked down two huge branches off of the same tree in our western tree line. By then Carol was in a nursing home so I left them until after she passed away the following month. Then my son Josh and I spent several days removing them with chainsaws.

That western tree line was now pretty much broken up and jagged. No longer was our yard mostly in the shade.

In June of 2009 I noticed that another huge branch was pointing right at my house from a dutch elm next to my unattached garage. If it fell it might have brushed up against my house but it definitely would have smashed our deep well plastic water cap it hovered over. So I had a tree service buddy of mine cut it down. A month later I noticed that one of my large walnut trees in the front yard was dead and leafless, so I had him remove that, too, before it could fall on my house.

Over the next couple of years two more large branches broke off along that western tree line but they both got hung up harmlessly in other trees next to them so I just left them there. Eventually they will fall to the ground and can probably stay where they land.

Carol and I had planted several smaller trees over the years, many of which had never really taken hold. They just made mowing more difficult, so I finally decided to have most of them removed, something I know Carol would never have agreed to. But that was my decision now.

But all of our other trees remained, including that Kentucky Coffee tree, the very tree I had recently begun parking behind on holidays and weekends to protect my car. (A drunk driver had totaled my previous car while it was parked in my own driveway the year before, but that's another story.)

Tornado Alley doesn't quite reach Michigan. Beginning in Texas and Oklahoma, it travels northeast but basically ends in Indiana and Ohio to our south. On rare occasions we might get a small tornado, and a few have touched down over the years, but the damage is nothing compared to what those living in Tornado Alley experience every year. Sometimes the outbreaks are so horrific they make the news for days, and we up north usually follow their progress.

One such outbreak happened quickly in November of 2013, unusual for the time of year since it was fall instead of spring. The news spoke of sustained winds of “tornadic force,” and even though they didn't hit every place along their path they didn't seem to dissipate, either. In the predawn hours of Sunday the 17th Washington, Illinois was decimated by a tornado. The South Bend, Indiana TV news warned of extremely high straight line winds that were heading our way. But what could I do except maybe run outside and take a few pictures? It didn't really occur to me that I might need to take cover.

That afternoon I parked my car in its normal spot instead of right next to that Kentucky Coffee tree in an effort to keep the few remaining birds perched overhead from greeting it so much. It began to rain, lightly at first, then increasingly harder, as Josh and I settled in to watch some NFL football.

Soon the light breeze began to howl, driving the now heavy rain nearly sideways while a high wind warning scrolled across the bottom of our TV screen. Was this what we were being warned about?

Suddenly the sound of the blustery wind outside throbbed within us as it ratcheted up to a deafening, deep roar, yet with a blood curdling, piercingly high pitched squeal.

We were ready. As Josh leaped from the couch I flew out of my recliner and raced to our side door we normally use but stopped at the sound of breaking glass and cracking wood. I looked back down the hallway into the living room and saw the top of my steel-reinforced front door smashed by that Kentucky Coffee tree, which now leaned at a 45° angle and rested above us on top of my house. If I had tried to run outside through that front door I would have run right into the path of that tree as it toppled over. As it was, we had barely escaped with our lives.

We ran outside through that side door and around to the front. That screaming wind burst lasted less than ten seconds but that was long enough. My front door was basically right in the middle of the front of my house, and that falling tree struck it while angling toward my bedroom and hung up on the roof. Three of its main branches punctured through and ripped open a huge, gaping hole there. The upper part of my outside eastern bedroom wall was pushed outward about a foot, but the cement block foundation of my house appeared intact and undamaged.

The front wall of my house from the southeastern corner to my front door was knocked off that foundation and stood upright on my porch. One of my bedroom windows that was in that wall was smooshed cock-eyed, with the drapes hanging out and flapping like a flag in the breeze.

The cement blocks of my porch buckled but surprisingly stopped the tree's fall so that it slid partially back into the hole created by its uprooting. If my car had been parked where it had been earlier, the roots that came up when the tree fell would have flipped it over, taking out both my house and my car at the same time. Some of the roots that snapped in two at ground level were six inches in diameter.

My indestructible tree had finally been destroyed. I marveled at how my house didn't just blow away. Inexplicably, my empty trash receptacle not twenty feet away hadn't budged an inch.

We walked back inside to check the interior damage. We could see outside where the front door had been, and about a fourth of the ceiling tiles in my living room and bedroom had fallen to the floor along with some wood slats, attic insulation, and broken wall plaster. The rain had stopped, but it was still dripping inside.

Joey, my lovebird, had a bird's eye view of it all as some of the falling debris bounced off her cage right next to my front door.

Finally, the electricity went out. The living room wall in the center of my house was bowed but my flat screen mounted there had survived unscathed, so we took it down and set it on the kitchen floor leaning against some cabinets with bath towels on it to protect it from getting scratched. We then moved our two recliners from the living room into the kitchen, hung a blanket over the hallway entrance to keep the cool night air out as best we could and hunkered down for the night.

It was dark by 6 pm but it was hard to sleep. It was too early and too cold as the temperature dropped from 60° to below 40°. I should have brought our kerosene heater up from the basement but I didn't think of it. So we slept as best we could and waited for the sun to come up.

At sunrise we ventured outside and resurveyed the damage. The electric meter from AEP was lying on the ground so the power wasn't going to come back on any time soon. The tree hadn't moved, held up by the house but mostly by the porch, since the space underneath it was solid dirt. My yard on three sides of my house was littered with so many broken branches, nearly waist-high in spots, of all sizes that you couldn't avoid stepping on them, as if they had exploded on contact with the roof. But it looked like only about 20% of my house was actually damaged so I was sure it could be repaired.

It was crucial to come to that conclusion for three reasons; one, there was no mortgage on it, two, I was thus able to live on my Social Security and small Whirlpool retirement checks, not touching my IRA, and three, the house was not insured. So it would be a real disaster if it was not repairable.

When Carol and I paid off our mortgage in 1997 our insurance on it also ended, and we never got around to restarting it. We just foolishly never gave it a thought. Now I wish we had. But at least I knew I could have my house repaired and pay for it from my IRA. That would just mean I'd have a little less money to leave my kids when I die. Everything else was still do-able.

It didn't take long to decide to stay with my parents in Stevensville some twelve miles away while the repairs were being made. At least we would have a comfortable, warm, place to sleep for free. They were only too happy to put us up.

When we left our house we saw a large tree in an open field about a mile away that had been sheared in half by that same wind burst that had uprooted my tree. Branches of all sizes from other trees were scattered along and in the road everywhere, and several people with chainsaws were cleaning up the debris. As we drove along we saw more trees in open fields either sheared in two or uprooted. Everyone's power for miles around was knocked out and wouldn't be restored for at least a day or two.

Later that morning I called my tree service buddy and left a message but he never called back. I then called a couple of building contractors. The second one, Bennett Construction, answered the phone. As I described my predicament the woman on the other end of the line interrupted me with “Is that your house on Watson?” When I said yes she said that they were just a couple of miles down my road and saw it right after it happened. She said her husband Shannon would call me as soon possible.

I then called my IRA agent and arranged for a check for $5000 to be sent to me. I knew the total repair bill would be much more than that, but this would at least be a good start.

Later that night Shannon called and we made arrangements to meet at my house the next day if he could get there before dark, as he was in the middle of other jobs. That didn't work out so we met the following day, Wednesday. By then some tree service guy had tucked his business card in my side door. I pocketed it and then called Shannon, who popped right over. We noted all the damage both inside and out. We also spotted one of my two cats walking down the inclined tree trunk. They could get in and out of the house through the space where the front door and wall had been.

As we chatted I learned that his younger brother, Loyall, went to school and had been friends with my oldest son, Justin, so he knew the house had been ours but didn't know I still lived there. I remembered Loyall when he and Justin were just little kids. We talked a little about those days, and Justin's mother's passing. So we had some good connections. And they were only just down my road.

Shannon said they could remove the tree and repair the house both. He hesitatingly gave me a low ball estimate he said might go up some because you can never tell for sure what you're getting into until you get into it. Here was the moment of truth. I was hoping it would be around $15,000 and so not give my IRA too big a hit. Shannon may have been worried, but when he quoted me an estimate of $10-12,000 I was actually quite relieved. I told him how I planned to pay for it all, and that I already had a check for $5000 on the way. He told me that was just fine and that they would begin the next day.

I liked the idea that these were guys I had a history of sorts with. I also liked the idea that they could remove the tree as well as fix the house. And I liked the idea that they lived nearby and so would have to drive by their handiwork every day. I hoped that would give them incentive to do a good job.

Every day I had to go to the house to check the mail. I took my lovebird over to my parents' house to keep her warm, but the cats would have to fend for themselves, other than my feeding them. I put heavy quilts on the recliners in the kitchen but that was the extent of their comforts.

When I came by that first day, Thursday, a five man crew, including Shannon, Loyall, their father, and a couple of other guys, was already there with a boom, a cherry picker, and chainsaws, removing the tree limb by limb and piece by piece, cutting them down to size and loading them onto the back of an open-top semi. They definitely had all the equipment anyone could need. They were busy getting at it, so I snapped a few pictures, chatted for a couple of minutes, and left greatly encouraged.

The plan for that day was to remove the tree and tarp over the huge, gaping hole in the roof and front of the house. The next night the temperature was predicted to drop to 20°. If the house couldn't be buttoned up enough to turn on the electricity then the furnace wouldn't run, and so I would have to camp out in the basement that night babysitting a kerosene heater to keep the water pipes from freezing and bursting. Josh bought a reading nightlight and some batteries and I made a pallet on the floor in front of my washer and dryer from the cardboard box our big flat screen came in two years before, and put couch cushions on it for a makeshift bed. I blocked off most of the basement with plastic sheeting I had gotten free from Lowe's to limit how much we had to heat, so we were ready if we needed to be.

It turned out we didn't need to be. The crew got the tree off the house and the tarp on by sunset that day, leaving only the stump for the time being. I called AEP and told them about the meter so they would be sure to bring another one, and asked them to call me before they got there so I could make sure the furnace kicked on okay. They would come by the next day, Friday morning.

Of course AEP called me after they turned the power on, but when I got over there my house was still cold. I checked the line and was getting no gas. Apparently the crew shut it off at the LP tank for safety reasons but forgot to mention that to me or turn it back on after the tree was removed. They also cut the cable line which somehow hadn't been broken off. But that could be taken care of later.

I turned the valve back on, bled the line next to the furnace, and it kicked on, so I set the thermostat at 50ºand left. From when the tree fell on Sunday to the hiring of the contractors to the removal of the tree to the house being buttoned up and the power and furnace back on by Friday seemed like good initial progress. But with that dominating tree gone the skyline sure looked different.

I also noticed that a few branches from some of my other trees also had been broken by that Big Wind. Some were large enough to require a chainsaw, but I decided they could all wait until spring.

No one came by that Friday to work on my house.

When my IRA check arrived later that day I took it to my bank to deposit it in my checking account. One of my bank's tellers is a neighbor from down the road who had also seen the tree on my house and asked about it. Everyone driving down Rock Edwards toward Watson had to have seen it.

On Sunday night Shannon called. Since the upcoming Thursday was Thanksgiving there seemed to be little reason to begin the outside repairs just to re-button up the house before they could be finished. They had interrupted other jobs in progress just to take care of my pressing need, so now seemed like a good time to finish some of them up and then get back to me the following week.

It was just as well. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving a snow storm dumped a foot of snow at my house. I happened to pick that day to get new tires on the front of my car, and when we got to my house right afterward I proceeded to get stuck in my own driveway. The plows had made the end even deeper but I blasted through, anyway. My driver door pushed snow just by opening it.

After feeding the cats and checking the mail I tried to back out but began fishtailing and ended up sideways at the very end of my driveway. But we dug out and blasted our way back onto the road. The next day my neighbor graciously plowed my driveway for me before I could snow blow it.

The break in the repairs gave Josh and me a few days to get rid of some things that had gotten damaged inside. We sacked up several trash bags of broken plaster, ceiling tiles, wood slats, and insulation, as well as some personal items, and then moved dressers, my bed, and the couch away from the walls inside that would likely be in the work crew's way. My two recliners stayed in the kitchen. It felt like my house was basically upside down, but I could see how this could all turn out okay.

As the temperature moderated and the snow melted, work the following week began on Tuesday and ended on Thursday, but those three days were a madhouse of activity. I decided to have my front bedroom wall rebuilt without a window, since it faced the oncoming road that T-bones the road in front of my house anyway. The crew removed that dead plum tree, since it was in their way, and squared up the outside wall. Before rebuilding and sealing the roof I had them add 18 inches of blown insulation on top of the puny six inches I already had, since this was the perfect time to do that. They rebuilt that now windowless wall and replaced the front door with one exactly like the one the tree had smashed. I should have had a 34” or 36” door installed instead of the 32” door I had, but I didn't think of it.

Ironically, there was one advantage to not having insurance to pay for all this. Shannon told me of some guy who needed house repairs before I did. His insurance was objecting to their bid, and in the meantime nothing was being done. I didn't have that problem. I could do whatever I wanted since it was on my dime, anyway. Philosophically that was cold comfort but at least it was something.

The broken rafters were rebuilt and with plywood and tar paper the house was now watertight and would hold heat. The front picture window in the living room, although broken, was still mostly intact. Some plastic sheeting and cardboard duct taped in place would keep the cold and snow at bay. I decided that now was a good time to have the remaining two bedroom windows and the living room windows replaced, so they measured and ordered them. It was also time to get another $5000 check.

No work was done the following week. It was now the second week of December, and I was getting concerned about how much longer this might take. Shannon and the crew were very busy but assured me we'd be home before Christmas, so I called Comcast to come over and reattach the cable.

Although we usually didn't see them, we could tell the cats were still around because their food was being eaten. Whenever they did make an appearance they were a bit skittish. They seemed to stay mostly in the basement, especially when the crew was there working.

Work during the week before Christmas again began on a Tuesday and lasted through Thursday. During this mad rush of activity the entire front of the house received vinyl siding, the roof was finished with the exact same style and color of shingles we used when the house was re-roofed in 2002, and most of the inside was finished. Since the drywall had cracked and buckled on two of my remaining three bedroom walls, I had the crew panel all four. They even managed to find the exact same style of ceiling tiles, having to drive in nasty weather up to South Haven to get them.

All that remained now, besides removing the tree stump and rebuilding the front porch, was a little inside trim work and replacing the windows, which were still on order. But we could move back in. So we spent the weekend painting ceilings and the living room walls. I reset the thermostat to 74º, and on Monday of Christmas week we moved back home. We had been out exactly five weeks, and the work to get us back in had all been done in seven days spread out over those five weeks.

Two weeks before moving back home Josh and I bought my parents their first flat screen as both a Christmas present from us and as our way of saying thank you for putting us up all that time. My mom cried when we moved back home.

The Polar Vortex of January accentuated some new characteristics of my house the added insulation gave it. For over thirty-five years the living room end was always cooler than the kitchen end in the winter, and the furnace, even our new gas furnace we bought in 2000, sometimes struggled to keep up. In the summer the central air struggled even more.

But now the living room end is the warmest, since it holds heat so much better, and the furnace doesn't run nearly as much, making the rest of the house slightly cooler. When the wind chill was -20° outside it was a toasty 74° inside, with the furnace off much of the time, even with the rickety and damaged windows. We experienced similar results that summer with the central air conditioning.

Three weeks later the windows finally came in and were installed in two days while the trim work was finished up. It was January 16th, one day shy of two months since the tree fell.

The next week the bitter cold, wind, and snow of winter returned with a vengeance, but now I could watch it comfortably from inside my warm house through my new draftless windows.

On a 75º April day, the warmest in six months, after much manhandling with a backhoe the tree stump finally broke into three pieces which Shannon hauled off to the back. It snowed two days later.

At the end of June my new front porch was finally built, now with a roof. All the dirt underneath my old one that kept that tree from smashing through my house was used to landscape around my new one. Now the front of my house looks brand new. On June 30th the rain gutters were finally installed.

That very night a ferocious storm packing 80 mph wind gusts ravaged Berrien County, uprooting or shearing off hundreds of trees and leaving over 37,000 people without power, including me for five days. Two months later there were still downed trees yet to be cleaned up.

But my beautiful, useful, and clearly durable new porch survived unscathed. Some of the crew came by and proudly took pictures of it. Still, I kind of miss my 100 year old Kentucky Coffee tree.

The final bill was over twice the original low ball estimate and nearly double what we paid for the house in 1976, due to all the extra work I had done, especially that porch. But it was worth it.

The joke now is my new gas grill on it will burn my house down. I'd better get some insurance.