When the lights went out, I was sitting on my couch, watching a Harrison Ford movie. In retrospect, I wish I had been up on the Village A rooftops catching Isabel full in the face. Instead, after a muddy round of tackle football, I retreated indoors, possibly due to my roommates’ infectious paranoia in the face of Mother Nature. After an ineffective shower, I plopped down on the couch. The movie, Frantic, was just starting to pick up-Ford, during a trip to Paris, was searching for his missing wife-when the screen narrowed to a white dot, then vanished.
I screamed “nobody panic!” and we lit candles and settled down to playing cards. And that was how it went for the next two days: games of poker, gin, hearts, euchre, Egyptian rat fuck, war, all the while straining to see my cards in the candlelight without tipping my hand. By day three, we were all going nuts in the darkness, and started spending as little time as possible at home. When we did, the infectious paranoia just got worse. On Monday, two roommates, curled up in a room upstairs, called me to find out if I was the person creaking around our house. I wasn’t, but when I returned home I found them out front, on the steps, refusing to go back inside until I checked all the rooms for thieves and murderers.
There weren’t any, but there was still plenty of excitement to be had after Isabel, because she tipped over a lot of trees, some of which landed on other things. By 3 a.m. Friday morning I was out, cruising the neighborhood for fallen foliage. Reservoir Road had a good example near 38th Street; one of the trees lining the boulevard tipped right across the street, blocking it entirely. This was clearly a high-priority tree-Reservoir, in addition to being a main artery, is the ambulance route to Georgetown Hospital-and by the next morning it had been neatly chainsawed into logs and placed next to the street.
The rest of the havoc in Burleith was low-priority, so there was plenty of time to check it out. A big tree on the block of 37th and 38th Streets tipped right over, parallel to the sidewalk, pulling up the soil in the boulevard. The tree was huge-stretched out, it spanned a half-dozen homes-and was so dense that its branches completely filled several front yards. It looked as if it could have done some real damage to several residents’ homes if it had tipped inwards instead of along the street, where it pulled all the branches off an adjacent tree.
This is one of those times that I wish I was a different breed of nerd. An engineering student could tell me why a tree may or may not crush a house. I just have to rely on my eye. Alls I know is, the tree was huge, and most buildings in Burleith are brick structures that went up in the 1920s. Their walls are designed to hold up the roof, which presses straight down, and not to have trees crash into them at an angle.
At least one S Street resident was similarly impressed. Midday Friday, as people were coming out to gawk (some with their eyes glued to video cameras, others trying to pretend they were just walking their dogs), she stood in what I presume to be the front yard of her unmolested house, telling anyone who would listen that it was “a miracle.” Possible, but if it was, it was a crappy miracle. The next tree closest to 37th Street shed exactly one branch, a foot-thick log that fell straight down and crushed two of her neighbors’ cars. Or maybe they just had it coming.
The overall award for most aesthetically striking destruction within six blocks of my house goes to a massive oak on Benton Street in Glover Park. If you’ve never been, the streets there are narrower, and the houses have a uniform look, centered around their substantial front porches. The oak on Benton fell towards the nearest house, where it settled into a comfortable lean, like a drunk friend. And there it stayed. Its branches were so thick that, from the street, you couldn’t tell if it had damaged the house.
Irene Hurley has lived in the house underneath the tree for 45 years. “I’m the one that got the blunt end of the stick,” she said. Her roof is full of holes, now covered by a tarp, and some brick was knocked out. “The house was livable,” she said, even though they were without power for five days because of a smaller tree across the street. Her tree was finally removed last Thursday.
“My son and I were on the porch about five minutes before it fell,” she said. “I told him, ‘I’m not sure about that tree.’ I went in the dining room, he went in the back, and we heard a thud. I have to say, the tree fell down gracefully.”
Bill Cleveland is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and assistant voices editor of The Georgetown Voice. Twins-Cubs Series.
