Mr. Sanderson, an old, retired navy man, was not usually given over to spouting meaningless hyperbole. He could gauge the nautical speed of his own small corner of the universe as well as anyone. But on this day at least, he seemed completely rudderless, stalled by a lack of wind into an excess of landlocked fury.
“The Aubrey’s got hit,” Mr. Sanderson told his wife in a somewhat weary, yet sharply punitive voice, as if his wife must have had something to do with whatever unfortunate event so recently befell the Aubrey’s.
The couple stood outside their home, strung at opposite ends of their short driveway as Mrs. Sanderson paused to stare lovingly at the flashy, pink, pie-sized flowers of the rhododendron bushes along the wooded edge of the drive. Mr. Sanderson stared from the quarterdeck of his own front yard down the three-hundred and seventy-one-foot length of their dead-end road, aptly named Potemkin Drive. The Sanderson house had been the first to be built along their narrow street more than twenty-five years earlier, which is how they got to name the road on which they would now live for all eternity—if eternity could hold up its end of the bargain.
“They got robbed?” Mrs. Sanderson finally deigned to reply, trying very hard not to listen to her husband at all, already tired of his unexpected presence on this early May morning. He was supposed to be out golfing.
“It’s even worse,” Mr. Sanderson retorted. “A tree fell on their house. Crushed one whole side of it. Luckily no one was hurt, but they’ll be out of luck living in their house for at least the next six months. What a costly disruption!”
Although certainly not an unknown phenomena, trees in this rural area of North Carolina had indeed begun falling at a steeply accelerated rate for over a year, and more and more homes were being hit. At first, the onslaught was blamed upon a pernicious drought, the consequences of which were that the severely damaged root systems of the trees allowed the behemoths to begin falling with unexpected stridency. However, the very next year brought with it a plenitude of rain, followed by an abundance of succoring sunlight, which allowed the nut trees to wildly overproduce. The enormous weight of their bounty was then blamed for the trees that collapsed onto the living quarters of those now caught within their brief, crushing arcs. Beyond these categorized causes, high winds and flooding rains sometimes cast whole trees onto the houses of unsuspecting residents without any rhyme or reason.
“Something has to be done,” Mr. Sanderson declared, looking skyward in horror at the towering trees overlooking the backyard of his decidedly not-so-modest home. “We’ll be decimated!”
Mrs. Sanderson listened to her husband, staring at him as he stood sideways to her, his arms gesticulating wildly at the silent trees overhead. But wasn’t that falling tree just a random event? she wanted to reply, but she did not dare interrupt her husband’s rant. Then, much to her dismay, she noticed that her husband;s close proximity gave him the appearance of a small plum tree, one fated by time and gravity alone to let fall eventually the dead, round weight of that ripe, enormous plum hanging from his ample middle.
A professor from the local community college, who was also an expert on the fauna and flora of their area, convened a meeting the next night to speak upon the subject of falling trees. Though only a few dozen people attended, news of the meeting quickly blazed a path through online media. A local television station interviewed the professor, a mysteriously intense man in his late fifties whose snaking trail of gray ponytail matched his grizzled beard.
“I explained to the people in attendance how the land in this area was clear-cut by the first settlers in the region. Having taken the time to clear the land, the original settlers and those generations after didn’t build houses next to tall trees – their houses were surrounded by farmland or bare pastureland. So when you build houses next to standing trees, there isn’t much you can do about it when the trees fall down,” he explained.
The television interviewer then asked the professor, “And how did the people attending the meeting react to your explanation?”
The professor paused. “Well, the first person to speak up was a man who had built several subdivisions in this area about a decade ago. He simply asked, “So we’re all effin’ effed, right?”
“What was your answer?” the interviewer asked, laughing nervously.
“‘Yep,’ I told him, ‘you’re all effin’ effed.””
Over the following weeks, dozens more trees fell. It was as if the earth had shifted upon its axis in a desperate attempt to shrug off an annoying weight that happened to be centered directly over their lives. Then a neighbor only three doors down from Mr. Sanderson had his property hit in the middle of the night by a falling poplar tree, slicing his detached two-car garage neatly in half. When Mr. Sanderson heard about it the next morning, he walked down to his neighbor’s house and graciously offered his personal assistance in removing the tree.
“Not until the insurance adjuster gets here,” his neighbor told him. “I don’t want to endanger the payout I need from the insurance company to rebuild this thing,” he said, pointing at the crumpled mass of timbers which had once been his garage.
“Smart thinking,” Mr. Sanderson replied. He then turned and walked back up the road to his own house, shouting at no one in particular about those probable, arcane particulars undoubtedly written into his own home insurance policy.
Later that afternoon, a man arrived at the stricken neighbor’s house. The man stepped out of his car and proceeded to walk to the front door and knock, but when the knock was answered the homeowner thought that some vagrant had come to his doorstep, perhaps some desperate person looking for food. The middle-aged man before him wore a suit and tie, but his attire was so wrinkled that it was obvious he had been sleeping in his clothes for several nights running. The man announced himself to be the insurance adjuster.
After a brief, impersonal greeting, the insurance man adjusted the black plastic rims of his eyeglasses and looked across the yard at the toppled garage. “Looks pretty bad,” he needlessly observed. “Give me a little while to assess the damage and then I’ll get back to you. First, I’ll need to take some measurements.” The adjuster made no apologies for the condition of his clothes, only mumbling briefly about how many trees had fallen onto houses recently.
Then, much to the homeowner’s surprise, the insurance man began to measure the perimeter of the house itself, completely ignoring the damaged garage. He worked hurriedly and without comment, writing down numbers inside a notebook while grumbling under his breath about the urgent need to replace his broken computer. In less than twenty minutes, the adjuster returned to the front door to tell the home-owner that the insurance office would contact him shortly with a decision about the amount of damage to the garage.
“Will I be receiving a check soon?” the homeowner demanded to know.
“If everything checks out, they’ll send you a check very shortly,” the wrinkled insurance adjuster assured him.
When the check finally arrived, it was accompanied by a letter saying that the company was sorry to have to drop the homeowner as a client. Their only explanation was that “adjustments to policies” were being made. The check itself reflected a building value based upon a tax-appraisal made by the county fifteen years earlier.
“Twenty years he paid premiums, on time, every time,” Mr. Sanderson nervously told his wife when he heard the news. “And then they dropped him as soon as he made a valid claim. I don’t know what’s worse: acts of God or acts of men!”
Before the end of that same summer, several new businesses sprang up outside the city limits, where the rents on buildings ran much cheaper. Their business cards were scattered everywhere: on car windows, the front doors of houses, inside local restaurants, as well as in those ads dotting the local cable channel. One of them was called “Piedmont Tree-Clamping Service,” but regardless of name they all pursued identical methods. Their plan was to clamp the roots of any and all possibly offending trees before they decided to topple, and therefore offend. They claimed to possess “guaranteed anchors,” and swore that “no tree has ever fallen under our care.” Of course, since no one in their area had ever heard of tree-clamping before, these claims of success were undeniably true.
Mr. Sanderson called one company at random as soon as he read their advertisement. “How much is it per tree to clamp these bastards down before they fall onto my house!” he sputtered in anxious rage to the office manager answering the phone.
“It’s only two-hundred-and-fifty dollars per tree,” a kindly woman’s voice replied.
“And this is guaranteed to work or I get my money back?” Mr. Sanderson demanded to know.
“We guarantee our clamps will do the job of holding up trees under normal circumstances,” she replied. “We can’t guarantee that a tornado won’’ take down a clamped tree, but then again, who can? The state legislature has passed a bill brokering with insurance companies that serve this area to guarantee a reduction in premiums for those using our services.”
Mr. Sanderson did not hesitate. “I’ve got ten trees here on a rise behind my house that need clamping, pronto! How soon can they get over here?”
When the workmen arrived, Mr. Sanderson went with them to the ridge behind his house. The clamps they brought with them had been shipped wholesale from China, where they were used to clamp the foundation walls of new buildings against earthquake damage during construction. Of course, the clamps they were using were meant to be laid in solid concrete, and although it was not completely unlikely that they would work on trees, no one really knew. A crew of workers crawled beneath the outstretched limbs of the giant trees, sledge-hammering long clamps into the ground wherever tree roots could be seen. One man carried around a heavy contraption that looked like an old oscilloscope with a small detecting device and a small computer screen attached. He claimed he could “read the probable layout” of the tree roots hidden underground with this setup. The largest clamps would then be hammered in where he directed them to be placed.
Fortunately for the owners of these companies, it was only well after the alternating freezes and thaws of that following winter and spring that the first trees clamped began to burst their bonds. Mr. Sanderson kept a ruler in his pocket to measure those increasingly empty spaces between the once tightly-clamped, ground-level roots and those U-shaped brackets now slowly inching skyward. After a few days of high winds near the end of March, it looked as if Mr. Sanderson’s three thousand dollars had gone into creating a maze of croquet wickets for those squirrels happily scurrying beneath the trees threatening his home.
Finally, Mr. Sanderson phoned the company again to tell them to come out and hammer the clamps back into the ground. The woman who answered the phone was a different woman than the one who’d answered before, and she told Mr. Sanderson that the tree-clamping business had moved on. She was readying the offices for the new owners – a tree removal service. She told Mr. Sanderson that one of the men who had worked for the tree-clamping company told her that hammering the clamps back into place would compromise the entire anchoring process. He also said that the mere fact of having clamps installed already would provide reduced insurance premiums even if, heaven forbid, a tree actually did fall onto the house.
“But they’ll just cancel my insurance policy after a minimum payout!” Mr. Sanderson screamed into the phone, just as the woman to whom he had been speaking quietly ended the phone call by putting the receiver back in its cradle.
Fortunately for Mr. Sanderson, the trees on his property did not fall. But as for the other trees in his neighborhood: down the road, up the way, along the path, deep in the woods, all around them actually, they continued to fall with mindless, random rapidity. Those living nearby became accustomed to seeing the same line of vehicles storming down the main road in the same repeated pattern: a fire engine in front, with a couple of police cars behind, followed by an array of pickup trucks privately owned by emergency volunteers all rushing together to the scene. Even the insurance adjusters finally caught on and joined the convoy, having smartly acquired their own emergency scanners and memorized the codes used for “fallen trees” and “damage to structures.”
But Mr. Sanderson viewed these instances of collective response as only further proof of the need for his own vigilance. He devised his own plan to save his trees, and thereby his home, with the aid of ancient technology. Having conferred with his son, who lived 2000 miles westward in that thankfully, almost treeless interior of the far Midwest, Mr. Sanderson arranged to buy a giant rope used on ships to hold their anchors. Two thousand dollars and a few weeks later, the rope arrived at his house on a giant flatbed truck. Mr. Sanderson directed them across an empty lot behind his land, and the rope was dumped off behind that rise of trees whose previously clamped roots had now escaped their bondage, showing utter disregard for the proclaimed wisdom of those who once believed in the clamping of trees.
Mr. Sanderson’s wife watched the arrival of the truck with particular interest. She was fed up with her husband’s ranting and railing over falling trees, along with his tall tales of the incipient destruction that awaited them all. When Mr. Sanderson finished dealing with the trucking company and returned to the house, Mrs. Sanderson asked him, point-blank, “What are you going to tie that giant rope to? A tree?”
Mr. Sanderson caught the import of his wife’s words, but he refused to acknowledge her impeccable logic. “When are you going to fix tonight’s supper? Tomorrow night?” he fumed. He would call his son again early the next morning.
Two weeks later and six thousand dollars more in cost, Mr. Sanderson finally had his anchor. The same trucking firm delivered the anchor to the same empty lot where the giant rope still lay. The anchor weighed five tons, and required the services of a backhoe just to nudge it off the truck and onto the ground. After completing the delivery job, the trucker and the backhoe operator stood together, snickering and pointing at the anchor while waiting to deliver their bills of service to Mr. Sanderson.
“Can you be ready next week to get your crew over here and tie these buggers off?” Mr. Sanderson asked the backhoe man, waving needlessly at that small grove of colossal trees towering above them.
“Sure thing,” the man said, “as long as the county don’t hire us to go out and cut down all the trees in the county before we get back here. They’re gonna nip this falling tree thing in the bud, yes sirree,” he told Mr. Sanderson. “There’s real money to be made solving this tree problem, for anybody that’s got the right equipment anyway.”
“County government cutting down my trees? We’ll see about that,” Mr. Sanderson told him. “They’re not touching my trees—I promise you.”
The county commissioners had indeed funded an expensive study on their area’s peculiar relationship to its standing trees, and after only a few months’ time they came up with a considered solution. They would use GIS software to determine each plat in the county containing a structure, then hire surveying crews from state-wide to determine exactly which trees had a falling radius likely to do structural damage. Then local, private companies would move in to cut down the trees. Yes, it would cost the county at least a thousand dollars per tree removed, and it would require an increase in millage rates for all property owners, including a hefty tax hike, the first in well over a decade, but for once the people didn’t seem to mind paying increased taxes to promote their common good. They had grown so tired of the trees and their gravitational deficiencies that they thought it was now best to try and live without them.
Mr. Sanderson, however, opted out after making a public promise to sue the county if they took his trees. He paid a tree service to climb up and attach the nautical rope to his entire grove by winding it through the maze of their massive limbs, thereby casting together into one, living entity those ten separate trees which now, hopefully, not even nature itself could put asunder. He had a hole dug at the back of the grove and a deep bed of concrete poured to keep the anchor in place, the great round eye of the anchor just sticking out above ground-level. With the help of the backhoe operator, who used the bucket arm of the tractor to pull the rope as reasonably tight as he could, Mr. Sanderson himself fastened the rope to the anchor with a nautical knot which he claimed could not unravel, which would, in fact, grow only tighter the more tightly it was pulled. Thousands of dollars later, Mr. Sanderson’s trees were firmly secure in that fickle ground where they had grown for well over half a century.
And the scheme worked. Each evening, Mr. Sanderson and his wife would stroll together to the empty lot behind their house and stare at the nautical wonder he had placed there. One evening, while they stood together admiring the knot he had tied, Mr. Sanderson bent down to inspect the knot more closely. He thought he detected some fraying in the rope at a crucial juncture, but when he tried to tell his wife his suspicions, no sound would come forth from his open mouth. Mr. Sanderson then collapsed onto that same ground whose strength he so recently had doubted, struck down by an aneurysm hidden deeply away like some smaller version of that gargantuan force bringing down great trees for no explicable reason; a force that was now both unassailable and unquestioning in its progress. It was only Mrs. Sanderson’s quick response in alerting emergency services that saved her husband.
Mr. Sanderson’s recovery was slow, and two weeks passed before his dormant consciousness completely returned to full light. His wife, during her daily visits, did not dare tell him that his experiment with the anchor had failed. Yes, all the trees had fallen, but only because when the first tree fell, the rope binding them brought them all down. The true, saving grace was that all of them fell in the same direction as the first tree, just missing the Sanderson house and damaging only that spectacular lawn itself.
The media, of course, caught wind of the story, and much fuss was made about all the trouble Mr. Sanderson had gone to in order to save his house, and how hard he had worked to avoid the county government’s plan to cut down all his trees The local college professor from before was called back in, and the same journalist from the local television station interviewed him beside the giant trunks of those trees now scattered across the Sanderson’s backyard. Afterwards, the professor looked back at that empty rise behind the house where the grove of trees had once stood, and he pointed back and shouted, “What in the blazes is that?”
The professor and the interviewer walked up the hill to the back of the rise. Then they called down to the film crew to bring their truck up the muddy slope and set up their camera. The anchor to which Mr. Sanderson had tied his trees was now exhumed into the clear air by the powerful force of the combined trees’ falling weight, the concrete slab sliding upwards until it stood like a statue upon the collapsed earth underneath it, a monument planned and executed in silent applause for the former naval man’s futile efforts.
“Well, it might have held back one tree, I guess,” the professor mused aloud.” Then he paused before asking rhetorically, “What will someone a hundred years hence make of this anchor being here, over five-hundred miles from the ocean?”
The interviewer chuckled nervously before then suggesting meekly to the professor, “Maybe they’ll say there was a great naval battle fought here?”
The professor pondered. “They say that truth is the first casualty of war,” he told her. “But that’s the way history works though, doesn’t it? Civilizations grow to completion best in the rich soil of their own lies.”
The local news did not carry on air these or any other of the professor’s added remarks concerning the anchor. The media was only interested in portraying the heroics of Mr. Sanderson’s efforts. The county’s plan, when completed, did save some structures from destruction, but the shadeless vacuum which now surrounded those splendid cottages and bungalows sent the local housing prices into free fall. Houses in nearby counties, their trees still intact, became highly valued for having kept their trees. And for reasons still unknown, the trees in Mr. Sanderson’s locale continued falling, the sudden vacancies left by their swift departures now spreading incrementally, evenly, in every direction of the compass.
