It was icy here last week. Black ice on every horizontal surface made for treacherous walking and driving. But the sun shone and, before long, melted the ice under foot and under tire. Sunshine on thinly iced trees and bushes made the world glisten and gleam. And I saw something amazingly gorgeous on one of the Traver ponds. Not having seen the situation shaping up, I don’t know where the icicle came from, but an enormous icicle hit the frozen pond in a spherical explosion of light. There was probably noise, too, but the astounding beauty of shattering, scattering crystals in the sunlight overrode my hearing. The sight was like fireworks, on the ground and made of ice.
We’ve had a new ice storm this week, far more powerful than the last one. We didn’t get a thin layer of ice this time. This week’s ice is thick. Heavy. The kind that weighs down branches and breaks trees. As darkness fell last night, the ice had a sound track, and it sounded like destruction.
C-rash! came from the roof over the garage. Sitting upstairs in the room next to that roof, I heard it clearly, along with all the scratching and rolling and secondary crashes that went with it. It was a limb falling from one of our maples, and it shook the house. Out one window, I could see the broken place on the tree; out the other, I could see the pieces of tree on the patio and deck and in the garden. A whole lot of potential energy got converted to kinetic energy when that limb came down. My husband, downstairs, thought the sound was thunder. So did Tanya, next door.
There was more crashing and more shaking of the house as the darkness deepened. “I hope that when this over, we’ll still have trees standing,” I said to my husband. “I hope that when this over, the house will still be standing,” he answered. MLive, which publishes the Ann Arbor News, reports this is the thickest ice we’ve had in fifty years. DTE, which provides power to much of the state, says further that the Ann Arbor area was the hardest hit.
Our house is still standing, as are most of our trees. There are broken trees everywhere around the neighborhood. Some neighbors down our street had a massive limb fall on their garage. Its branches entirely block their driveway, and their cars are in the garage. The woods on the west side of Thurston Pond took a massive hit—devastation is the word that springs to mind. My husband ran an errand across town this morning, and says that our immediate area has the most tree damage of any area he saw. In last week’s ice, Anne and Todd lost a major section of the serviceberry in their front yard. This week, they lost another section, along with a major limb of the Bradford pear on their lawn extension. The downed limb now blocks both the street and the sidewalk, and without that section, there’s not much left of the tree. The bright side of the damage is that Anne and Todd have wished the pear tree gone for years, and at this point, the city will need to do something about it.
Of course, the glazed-over world is lovely, down to the details. Grass at the edges of lawns now extends over the sidewalks, each blade fattened by its new coat. Doing a little trail tidying in Sugarbush, I picked up a twig and found myself marveling at its color, reddish brown inside its transparent tube. The storm has softened the look of the woods—not in the way of spring, with buds and leaves and blossoms, but in the way of winter, with ice.
My first views of the outdoors this morning were cause for both relief and despair. All the trees I could see were damaged, some significantly. There’s a lot of work ahead, and the neighborhood won’t be the same after this ice. What perked me up again was seeing the little boy across the court tearing around his yard with his toy lightsaber, ready to take on any downed branches that put up a fight. In the Sugarbush woods, later, the dog and I met up with a tiny tot and his grandfather, each carrying a shovel. Grandpa said they were looking for ice that needed to be broken up, branches that needed to be moved. There is joy to be had; you just have to know where to look for it.
The ice is melting now. Weather reports say more is on the way.
24 February 2023