June 24, 2019 The tree, the crash, and the aftermath (Part One)

A really good shot of the Greenhouse having been crushed.
There were two large trunks which fell.

Ann wrote a pretty good post about her experiences with the tree fall incident that happened back on the eighteenth. But, since I holed up in bed for a few more weeks I thought I might try to paint a better picture of what happened. Since we don't know the actual effects of the tree fall I'm figuring there will be a need for a follow-up or two.

Tuesday was a good day, right up until the tree fall ruined it for all of us.

Looks like a war zone.
Click on images to see them properly.

We had spent the morning doing what we do We got the Farm going near sun-up, got breakfast, and looked forward to the day. I found a woman willing to give up a whole lot of succulent plants (very useful in future garden plans) and we went out to scoop them up. We grabbed donuts on the way home (this will actually figure large in the story because it delayed lunch).

Returning to the Farm (always a favorite) Ann took the succulents out to the Flower Garden to let them begin to reproduce themselves while I went out the Strawberry patch to continue a mulching/weeding project I had started last week.

At about two I got to the end of a row and decided to check up where Ann was in her project. The donuts we ate earlier had made out usual one-thirty lunch break a moot point, but even donuts wear off and I was getting hungry and very thirsty. I finished up and headed out to find Ann.

She was in the Greenhouse as I walked to the Market Garden, looking like she was packing something into a pot. I called out to tell her we ought to stop for a while and get something to eat. There was a stiff breeze in the air, but otherwise the weather was perfect. As I came through the Market Garden gate nothing appeared wrong in the least way.

Just as I came to the Greenhouse door I heard a cracking noise coming from a tree, a sort of gunshot noise, very rapid fire. I knew which tree was going over, but otherwise had no time to think about the what's or the where's. I remember entering through the Greenhouse door, grabbing Ann's upper arm, pulling her through the door, and telling her to run. This was about all of the time I had to act, the rest was pretty much free form and I lost track of Ann shortly after that. I didn't have time to think about things and since I couldn't run through Ann, going to the right, I decided to make a run for the left side of the tree, but this meant going trough the Greenhouse. I got about a step and a half in before things  got loud and went black for a moment.

The little square near the middle is where I was.

When I opened my eyes I was down on the ground. My right foot had been pinned under my body and was pressed against my hip. I didn't know if I was hurt, but I did know I was alive and this was something of a surprise since I also knew that I had been hit in the head by a large falling tree. I began calling out for Ann (who came through it all). She began asking me where I was.

The was taken from the western side.
Still has plenty of usable space.
I faced out into this space as I looked out/

I was about six feet inside the eastern door and all I could see was the western end of the Greenhouse and a bunch of greenhouse wreckage. The wonderful tomato trellis I had made of re-purposed ladders, which had only just last week taken the first weight of the tomato plants, was twisted and the boards holding them together were splintered. The roof structure of the Greenhouse itself (just rebuilt after being collapsed by Winter snow) was torn apart and pressed down under the enormous weight of the tree. I didn't so much notice these things and recognize them in my memory as I tried to piece together what had happened.

Somehow I managed to get my foot out from underneath my hip. It hurt, but I'm tough. I was calling to Ann and she back to me. We established that we were okay, if not all right, and she began calling out the Jay (our neighbor who was working on his own tiny house project about two hundred feet away). She called out for quite a while, getting louder with every attempt. All I could do was stay put.

From outside of the Greenhouse it would
have been difficult to see where I had landed.

As it turned out I was pinned between the tree (and the wreckage) on the top and the left, the ground on the bottom, and a blue planter half-barrel on my immediate right. This planter barrel, which I had intended to move out of the Greenhouse a few week earlier, turned out to be the thing which saved me. Being full of dirt, it took the weight of the tree fall and stopped it, leaving just enough space for me to survive in the nearly two foot space it maintained under the falling tree.

Note: What more can I say? Laziness paid off. I will never again pass up the opportunity to not do something which doesn't need to be done right away. 

As I lay on the various slabs and tables of the Emergency Room at Tuality Hospital, I went through the day's events. One of the things I remember, prior to the tree falling, was working happily in the Strawberry patch. The sun was very sweaty warm, my hands were blistered by the work. The job I was doing was hard, but it looked like it would pay off large in the satisfaction of it. I remember thinking that, if I had to do this hard work for the rest of my life, I could do it easily. I fell in love with farming that Tuesday. The work of it and for the sake of it. I only left the job behind because my wife needed a break and wouldn't want to be the one to stop the day's work. I remember being proud of where we were and what we were doing. And then POW! It all could have ended there.

Th base of the tree which fell.

Note to self: Life isn't a set of tragic choices. A series of acts which navigate between the bad outcome possibilities present within the set of all things possible. Life is loving what you do, who you are with (even if alone). Life is full of good reasons to do things and good reasons to leave things be.

After all of this episode is finished, the last stitch pulled out of the newly minted surgical scars, we will be fine. The important stuff isn't the stuff which might be damaged. The important stuff is what might be lost. My wife made it out of the greenhouse where she was standing in the direct path of the tree which hit me. She was unhurt. I wasn't (but I'm tough).

The other side of the tree fall.

There were a thousand possible outcomes of the tree tipping over, nearly all of them very, very, bad. The best outcome would have been that the tree fell toward the north and missed us completely, but the range of possibilities included the tree falling with us safely in our bed, or us getting lunch on time. Barring these the possibilities which put both of us, the tree, and uncontrolled gravity, in the same space, were mostly bad. Somehow we found one of the possibilities which did not include someone living alone for a long time or spending the rest of our lives in pain or reconstruction. We both came away from this whole thing more grateful for the opportunities ahead.