The Fallen...

It was another wet and windy day in Queens during March of this year. New York was experiencing horrible weather. It rained almost every day and the winds were extremely powerful. It was late afternoon when the sun would have normally been shinning bright in the sky, but the thick layer of clouds created a gloomy day. Despite the weather, however, life goes on and my family needed to eat. My mother and sister and I decided to pick up fresh fish from the fish market near our home. I wasn’t excited about going on the market and smelling the stench of fish, so I chose to sit in the car. My mom parked the car about one car length away from the corner on the major boulevard the fish market was located on, which happened to also be in the front of the market. I sat bored in the car, watching the do not walk sign flicker, the little white man appear and then the rotation of the lights between red, green and yellow. This continued until I looked down to check a text message I received on my phone. When I looked up I realized that the spotlight at the corner displayed neither green, yellow nor red. I sat there puzzled for a small amount of time, until I began to see people crowd around the corner of the block. Then I saw a fisherman come from around the corner, grab another guy, then went back around the corner out of my sight. Me, being nosey, I decided to get out the car and walk over to the corner to what the fuss was about. At this point, it was only drizzling, perhaps even lighter, like a mist in the air, so I didn’t mind my curiosity. So when I turn the corner, all I see is a huge tree lying across the entire street of rows of what it seems like identical houses. As the image becomes clearer, I even spotter a white car crushed under the trunk of the tree. The tree’s fall was so dramatic I didn’t even hear it! Sitting no more than 200 meters from the incident, I didn’t hear any impact between the tree and the car. This made me think of the famous mind puzzler which says, “If I tree falls in the middle of the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Trees have to make a sound when they fall. Desks and chairs made of wood make sounds when dropped. When a person steps on a branch it makes a sound. So why wouldn’t a massive tree, taller than most of the houses in my area, make a sound? Maybe this tree just fell slowly. Parts of the roots were still in tact after I took a closer look. It could have landed on the car nice and slowly, but the weight of the tree crushed it. Either way this was still amazing. The tree actually uprooted the concrete sidewalk and the soil underneath. The roots were massive and deep. Some were the size of a grown man’s legs. Even with this now two feet deep hole in the soil, some of the roots still tunneled deeper into the moist brown soil. The tree even feel on and broke power lines, which is what caused the stop light to stop working, and also part of it was on someone’s home. The broken extension of one the power lines was hanging in the middle of the street sparking like little tiny fireworks. My mom cautioned me to stay away. After taking some pictures, as if this were a unique case, we left to go home. On our way back home, we saw about 3 more trees that had fallen. Some fell on people’s homes and others stretched across residential streets blocking traffic. Large branches that broke off leaned on power lines before they eventually fell. Some of the trees fell directly from the ground, being uprooted, like the one I first saw. Others were old and cracked either straight down the middle, or in half at the base of toward the center of the tree. One tree’s roots stretched across three sidewalk squares causing there to be a wide mound of soil protruding from the ground when it was uprooted. After many days of rain, the soil was too moist to sustain the trees roots with such powerful winds. The wind practically ripped the trees up like a gardener pulling up weeds. It was amazing seeing firsthand the power of nature. I’m just happy no one got hurt and hopefully the owner of the car has insurance.