09.22.2003 - 4:34 p.m.

The hurricane prevented seven of eighteen students in a class I teach from writing papers this weekend. It kept me from preparing for that same class. It kept me from writing not because I�d lost power, but because it was there, because it was bigger than me, and I could think of nothing else. The hurricane took so many trees that I notice a new ruined trunk every time I leave my doorstep; it wasn�t the worst storm I�ve ever seen. It wasn�t the longest, or the wettest, or the scariest. It just killed the most trees.

I came to work today with bark bits under my nails, small sticky patches where I�d failed to scrub out the pine sap, and the biting smell of chainsaw exhaust sitting in my sinuses. The hurricane left me with a sunburn, scratches from holly leaves and fence screws, and the sore muscles one uses in throwing logs out from a tailgate.

On campus, along the bell tower path, they�ve started cutting up the largest of four fallen trees. It is unbelievable how large a tree is. Even the trees you think of as young and puny turn monstrous once they are horizontal. So long. So thick. So difficult to carry in foot-and-a-half sections. The big tree on the bell tower path was not young or puny, and now it is spread down the hill from its stump in cut logs and torn boughs and deep gouges in the dark earth. I used to bank off of that tree in Frisbee golf. Now its stump faces me on my way up the path, a collection of pale splinters as tall as I am bound together by half-torn roots. I could sleep in the hole beneath it.

Thursday night I was standing on a deck in the wind and rain and the crack of pines falling in the dark, but I think the power of any given storm is in what it leaves behind, in the shattered innards of a tree surrounded by caution tape and a beautiful day.

-stonebridge

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