Storm report
Walking through the park after these weeks of storms is like a grim visitation to one long accident scene. Every day I go out, it seems another giant has toppled or lost a limb or is teetering at a precarious angle. More branches, sticks, scrolls of eucalyptus bark and pine cones litter the ground, like the high tide wrack on a beach. Fallen trees and sudden mini-lakes have forced the closure of roads, trails and meadows and kept gardeners and forestry crews busy from dawn til midnight. Yellow caution tape marks off trees with broken or dangling branches. The danger is real; a falling branch claimed the life of a 73-year-old woman in January. This is the most intense winter season I can recall in decades.
Pine down across Martin Luther King Way. (photo courtesy of Rec and Park)
Rec and Park doesn’t track what it calls “tree failures” by individual park. But citywide, 208 trees have gone down in city parks since December. I know of at least a dozen in Golden Gate Park. (See pictures below)
And by the way, doesn’t “failure” seem a strange way to describe the event? Failure sounds clinical, so mechanical – like a stalled-out engine. It’s so inadequate to the loss of a being that stood sentinel for 80, 90, 100 years or more. Am I being overly sentimental? Maybe, but it’s still painful to see fresh gashes on trunks where a branch was violently ripped off. To come across a prone tree with its massive root system exposed makes me feel small and a little vertiginous.
Joanna Klink writes about this in her beautiful poem “On Falling (Blue Spruce)”. Here’s an excerpt:
Before it was possible
to imagine my life
without it, the winds
arrived, shattering air
and pulling the tree
so far back its roots,
ninety years, ripped
and sprung. I think
as it fell it became
unknowable. Every day
of my life now I cannot
understand. The force
of dual winds lifting
ninety years of stillness
as if it were nothing,
as if it hadn’t held every
crow and fog, emptying
night from its branches.
* *. *
Tamara Aparton, spokesperson for Rec and Park, says most the trees that fell were healthy. I had assumed otherwise, given that so many of the park’s pines, cypress and eucalyptus are old and ailing, stressed by drought, disease and pests.
“Compared to some other parts of the city, Golden Gate Park didn't fare too badly,” Aparton says. Stern Grove has been closed since late last year because of all the fallen or unstable trees. On March 11, an 85-foot eucalyptus crashed through the roof of the historic Trocadero Clubhouse.
The storms of 1995 left a much bigger trail of destruction. High winds blew down hundreds of trees in the park and the Conservatory of Flowers was so badly mangled – the glass dome mostly shattered -- officials thought for a while it would have to be demolished. The devastation made clear Rec and Park had not kept up with pruning and replacing vulnerable trees; it triggered a big reforestation program.
Perhaps the lesser damage this time around is evidence that the park’s forest is in a much healthier state. Certainly I’m glad when Aparton tells me that for every tree that is lost, two new ones are planted.
* * *
Here are some recent photos of the storms’ aftermath: