Derecho

What a fun word, derecho. The national weather service defines it as "a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms." It's not very often that North Carolina sees a derecho, but June 13 we caught the tail end of one that swept across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.  Team Beck - Oklahoma were visiting and we had just come back in from the front yard when the wind came through. It sounded like the world was coming apart.  The whole wind event didn't last but a few minutes and resulted in nearly 24 hours of electricity-free time for us. Andy and I pulled a fallen pine tree out of the road and we all walked the road to check on the status of the Bradford pears in the neighborhood. Two down, but many more left standing. Maybe next storm.

Post storm, we surveyed the property and found that we had lost the top out of the one of the old property line white oaks that run along the back of the property. Luckily, the top had fallen into the woods and not damaged any of the houses behind us. The rest of this post is all about the fun we had cleaning up the busted tree. Here was the scene, that nice bright spot at the top is where the top of the tree used to be. The top of the tree was suspended about 10 feet up the side of the tree from whence it came (shown near bottom of photo), so we decided we'd better at least get it to the ground.

We took a few shots for scale as well with me on one side of the mess and Jessie on the other, see if you can see my bright orange hard hat!

I attempted to fire up the old McCulloch Chainsaw only to find that it was unwilling to start. So, I grabbed the bow saw and my Snow & Nealley double bitted axe and headed into the woods.

After much sawing, resting, chopping, resting, and a bit of swearing we were successful in making the mess a little less dangerous. Maybe when I get the chainsaw up and running we can actually get this stuff diced up a bit more. Here I am post-success giving an unintended tribute to my dad by being photographed eyes shut.