Apocalypse of Trees
Toppled trunks and the rumps of root balls litter the Land of the Sleeping Bear
Photo by Paul May / Glen Arbor Artisans
By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
King Lear
“Where were you when . . .?” None of us will ever forget, and so now we will always trade our stories of this shared local tragedy. Waiting for Kelly McAllister to make me a malted, I gazed through the windows of McCahill’s Crossing Dairy Bar at the Glen Lake Narrows to see the eerie white cloud front race at terrific speed eastward across Little Glen Lake. Instantly the air was a greenish blue-black chaos of horizontal hail, thick rain, and leaves. Heedless of the danger, we gawked out the big windows at plunging power lines, frantic trees, and the growing line of cars refusing to cross the narrows and the bridge they couldn’t see because the lake was airborne. When the lights went out for good Kelly calmly called Consumers on her cell. We only had to inch around one tree as we drove homeward on Benzonia Trail minutes later. Countless others were not so lucky, and their stories have been our daily bread for a frantically memorable, strange, and communal cleanup of a week.
At first it reminded some of the sudden wind squall of 1987. It was almost exactly the same time of year, also on a weekend, high summer and very hot, and that also began with an ominous storm front out over the lake that shooed everybody off the beach. That one tossed trees, scattered branches, flattened corn fields, and knocked out power, but most of its fury focused on bulldozing a big swath of trees between the Crystal River and Northwood Drive north of Big Glen. I remember that power was out for several days, and Tim Barr grilled burgers nonstop on a big grill outside the front door of Art’s Tavern, which had no generator then. Dogs, cats, and people were drawn to the cloud of smoke he kept going over the center of town. Dan Weisen shuttled back and forth to Honor to keep the big chest coolers inside Art’s full of ice. There were candles and lanterns on the bar, and the beer they dug out of those coolers was the coldest you ever tasted. It was a significant weather event, another straight-line wind shear of impressive strength. But this year the whole stretch of Northwood Drive, especially along the shore where the cottages are, is a jaw-dropping jumble of mature tumbled oak and pine pounded down all around the dwellings. When the scale and scope of this storm became the shock of Sunday night and Monday morning, that ’87 storm became just a distant candy-ass sniveling caspermilquetoast of a storm in comparison.
Was this a tornado? Or was it like a horizontal tornado, a hurricane, a straight wall of wind that hoovered uncountable trees across its ugly swath from Alligator Hill down through Glen Arbor over Big Glen to Miller Hill, to Sugar Loaf, and on across The County? It was both and more, and now that the power is back on we will worry that question like a sore tooth in barbershop and bar chats for years to come. By now we have all seen the stunning pictures: the sneering curled lip of white cloud grinning over the Manitous, the row of ragged teeth at its lower edge, the furious purple bruise brooding behind its rumbling, lightning-flecked march toward the shoreline. Rob Karner was at Good Harbor snapping images of the northern edge of the storm when he realized that another cell to the south was converging to join it. Boats on Big Glen were scattered like candy at the Fourth of July parade. There’s a picture of a pontoon boat upside down on top of another pontoon boat. Now home videos are popping up showing boats tipped and resting on 50 feet of mud at the west end of Little Glen where the front pushed and sucked all of that lake water to the east. The middle of the storm seems to have mashed down all of the trees in the same direction, but other spots reveal a twisted tangle, like the 200-yard stretch near the red schoolhouse up M-22 just north of the Little Traverse Inn. The huge white pines toppled next to the Leelanau School Lanphier Observatory were all pointed southeast, not east like most of the trees in Glen Arbor. Whether it was a straight line wind or a classic bow echo, this storm was so big, powerful, and complex that its true dynamics may remain one of nature’s secrets.
A friend ventured up Alligator Hill on Thursday (despite the warnings not to) and remarked on the stillness brooding over the enormous pick-up-sticks tangle of oaks, maples, and pines, all those species of trees snapped or matted down, the entire canopy crushed. Where are the birds? Surely thousands of birds have also been destroyed, and the silence is ghostly with the absence of their songs. The devastation on the slope of Alligator Hill along M-22 between Glen Arbor and Sunset Drive is stunning and painful to see, as is Northwoods Drive and Dunn’s Farm Road between The Foothills and Miller Hill Road. How can so many trees have been destroyed? Will the National Park Service have to clean up the hundreds of acres of downed wood within the Park in order to prevent fire danger as it all dries out, or will its policy of letting nature take its course mean that those thousands of trees will rot down to feed the humus and nourish the next generation of trees, the canopy to come, the climax forest of the future?
Awesome too has been the response of this community, and the number of heroic deeds and heroes among us. We thank and praise those who helped the man whose car was crushed on Dunn’s Farm Road, and those who patiently prevailed to rescue the hikers lost for most of Sunday night on Alligator Hill. We recognize the strength and generosity of the Jeff Gietzens, the Tim Barrs and Bob Sutherlands, the Brad Andersons, the Bill Walters and all of their staff folks who kept the town supplied, fed, and provisioned through an intense and challenging week. We won’t forget the countless and nameless volunteers who pitched in everywhere, the tree cutters, linesmen, and power restorers, the emergency responders and deputies, and the leadership of Sheriff Borkovich throughout the ongoing recovery. It is a miracle that no one died in the storm or its aftermath.
The ordeal of this tragic “Treemageddon” now becomes local lore, a new chapter in the Legend of the Sleeping Bear. In one way or another we all participate in this legend by creating order out of chaos, by telling our stories. Where were you when the storm hit?
