Ornoth

Most of us will remember 2021, when Texas’ mismanaged electrical grid suffered near-complete failure due to a series of winter storms. Texas’ 2021 power crisis was the most expensive disaster in state history; 11 million people went without power and between 250 and 700 residents lost their lives.

How many tons of ice can one tree hold?

A world of frozen tears

Ice sickles

The scene outside our cul de sac

Who puts utility lines thru the root ball of a tree?

Our two broken water lines sticking out of the ground

So it’s understandable that locals were shellshocked and traumatized when a heavy winter ice storm fell upon the Texas Hill Country this past week. I too have ominous memories of previous ice storms, specifically the 1998 ice storm that wreaked havoc on an immense swath of Central Maine woodlands.

So when the National Weather Service issued its first warnings about light freezing drizzle, I weighed my options. Although we were adequately stocked, I could go top off our groceries. But I didn’t want to deal with either a frenzied mob scene at the grocery store, nor risk any icy roads, especially the steep descent into our cul de sac. So I chose to just sit tight. That was on Monday January 30, as the first rounds of rain and evening icing began.

Tuesday featured light rain and temperatures above freezing, but a worsening forecast. The NWS ice warnings were expanded to a much larger area, and intensified their language from “light and isolated” to “significant” impact. As evening fell several auto crashes were reported, but the major freeze and rainfall was expected after midnight.

Wednesday February First I woke up to what everyone feared: bent-over trees and slick roads coated with half an inch of ice. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but I knew how dangerous and damaging that much ice would be… Which was driven home when a shade tree in our backyard came down in three separate chunks, barely missing our fiber optic internet line.

We nervously stayed inside and helplessly waited it out. Meanwhile, tens of thousands – nearly a third of Austin – were without power. Fortunately, other than losing that one tree, it was a quiet day for us, without much additional rain or ice accumulation.

But it was a nerve-wracking night. Windswept thunderstorms came through, keeping us awake and adding more water and ice. It was impossible to sleep through rolling thunderclaps and the rifle cracks of huge branches being torn from the surrounding trees.

At 4am I heard activity outside and went to see what was going on. The huge hundred year old live oak that straddled the line between our property and the neighbor’s had toppled over. In the process, it had landed on his Land Rover, blockaded his front door, and ripped up the two water lines to our house and the one next door. Water was jetting a meter or two across our yard and undermining our driveway. Paul – our neighbor – was out there in the pouring rain and darkness with a manhole lifter trying to get at the city’s water shutoff valve. We got that done and retreated to our respective homes to wait for daylight to assess the damage.

That’s how Thursday began. Fortunately, above freezing temperatures allowed me to drive to the still-quiet grocery to pick up two 5-gallon jugs of water plus needed supplies. The neighborhood looked like a war zone, with Valleyside Road closed and trees down everywhere. Paul had lost another sizable tree out back, and a branch was leaning against our power line. As the day warmed, ice began falling off the trees in dangerous chunks. And shortly after my grocery run, a water main break developed on Hart Lane just a couple hundred meters uphill from us.

Everyone came out to do triage, which gave me the opportunity and excuse to meet all our neighbors: Paul, Maureen, Mario, Allison, Gary, and John. All were kind and overflowing with empathy after having helped one another through the 2021 storms. Despite his own power outage and downed trees, our landlord spent much of the day on-site, taking stock and trying to get a plumber out to repair our water pipes.

By evening we still didn’t have water, but the storm was over and everyone was in recovery mode. I was surprised that none of our black walnut trees had come down, but I was more stunned that we never lost internet or power, since those lines come up through the heavily wooded gully behind our house where Dry Creek runs.

After our first restful sleep in days, Friday was a full-on cleanup day. The plumbers arrived at 7:30am and got us reconnected by mid-afternoon. We got our first showers in 3-4 days, but had to later recall the landlord to fix a broken toilet ballcock and valve.

Meanwhile, our landscaper neighbor had a crew trimming back the limbs of the fallen live oak, as another crew took down our fallen tree and the limb that was resting on our power lines. It was, as Inna called it, the day of “dueling chainsaws.”

Outside our neighborhood, things were still dire, with ten percent of the city without electrical service. Battery backed-up traffic lights were running out of power, leaving intersections uncontrolled, while the Austin police – who have had a combative relationship with citizens since the “defund the police” movement – refused to direct traffic.

Saturday the live oak was finally fully cut up. Despite the ongoing noise of chainsaws and gas-powered electric generators, for us it was a blessed day of rest and a return to normality after six days of discomfort and anxiety.

The most lasting impact of the storm was the loss of that great oak, which shaded our driveway and defined the visual appeal of our street. That’s a tragedy.

But on the positive side, everyone seems fine and we had no major damage to contend with. But it sure was a memorable part of our first month here in Austin!

I must admit, I’ve always been kinda confused by vegetarians.

Many, if not most, vegetarians avoid meat out of compassion for other living beings. This is, of course, a laudable sentiment that I personally agree with and support. If I were a vegetarian, this would be my primary motivation.

On the other hand, vegetarianism that’s based on the sanctity of life doesn’t make much sense if you agree that plants are just as much “living beings” as animals. Is killing and eating a plant really any less violent than killing a cow or a lamb? Why? Is it because we feel more “kinship” with that cow than we do, say, a turnip?

The history of human ethical development can be viewed as a glacially slow progression of extending respect to other life forms. We began back in the caveman days, when Grog came up with the revolutionary idea that he shouldn’t cross the river and kill Kracken’s whole family, since they were kinda the same as his family.

Tens of thousands of years later, mankind is still struggling with the idea that people from the neighboring country are kinda the same as we are, even though they talk funny; that people are still people, even if they worship ridiculous pagan gods (or, heaven forbid, some blasphemous variation of our own); and that we are all one, even if our skin color isn’t.

Here’s where I give vegetarians credit: they’ve extended that idea of kinship, and the compassion that comes with it, to other mammals. You don’t eat cows and pigs and dogs and lambs because, dammit, there’s something about them that we can identify with and care about. We don’t want them to suffer and die just for our convenience. Well done, Captain Vegetable!

But that’s just one more incremental step along a long path of ethical development: one more case of us realizing that just because something is different doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of our honor, respect, and compassion.

The next steps in our ethical development are obvious: extend that same degree of compassion to birds, fish, shellfish, and insects. Giving mammals preferential treatment over other members of the animal kingdom makes about as much sense as giving Jews preferential treatment over Muslims.

Oh. Right. We’re not quite there yet, are we? Maybe someday.

Objectively, fish and insects are life forms just like you and I, and the more we respect life, the more we must care about their suffering, too. There are already people who, instead of swatting them, escort their household bugs outside, being careful not to harm them.

Assuming we finally manage to extend our compassion beyond our fellow humans and other mammals, to fish and insects, it’s only a matter of time before we finally admit that plants are living beings, too.

And here is where I must ask of my vegetarian friends: why is the life of one stink bug more precious than our annual destruction of millions upon millions of tomato plants, or corn stalks, or Christmas trees?

The precedent has already been set of humans taking action to save an individual redwood or a swath of forest from being clear-cut. That action makes no sense unless the idea has begun to take root that all life—even vegetables!—is worthy of our respect and compassion.

Of course, I’m not arguing that vegetarians should stop eating vegetables, or ethically regress by resuming eating meat. It’s an unfortunate and unavoidable fact that right now, humans must eat formerly living beings in order to survive.

That’s an interesting realization, because it establishes an ethical dilemma for us: our survival requires us to kill living beings. Since most religions say that killing is one of the worst actions one can perform, doesn’t that mean that mankind is inherently evil?

That’s an interesting contrast to what we normally hear, which is that humans have a favored position in the universe. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all assert that man was created in God’s image, and Buddhism says that a human rebirth is a rare and precious opportunity to attain enlightenment. A good example is this quote, attributed to Anagarika Darmapala at the 1892 World Parliament of Religions:

To be born as a human being is a glorious privilege. Man’s dignity consists in his capability to reason and think and to live up to the highest ideal of pure life, of calm thought, of wisdom without extraneous intervention.

But how do we reconcile this self-congratulatory view of ourselves with the gory fact that every day of our lives we must kill and eat our fellow living beings?

Now let me set the question aside and take a bit of a side track, because that idea dovetails nicely with some of my own feelings concerning the sanctity of nature, and particularly trees.

Since childhood, when my summers were spent along wooded lakes in Maine, I’ve felt a deep spiritual respect for trees. In college, there was a particular pine tree deep in the woods behind campus that was “my tree”, where I’d go to commune with nature, and more recently I have similarly rooted myself to a particular spot near the Arnold Arboretum’s “Conifer Path”.

Combining this with my previous train of thought has given me a better reason to admire trees from a spiritual standpoint. Think about it: unlike us, trees don’t need to kill anything in order to survive. In fact, trees do zero harm at all, yet they have the longest lifespans of any complex living organism on our planet.

From a Buddhist perspective, trees are the epitome of equanimity, stoically accepting life as it is, with no need to control it or change it. They are equally connected to the air, the earth, and to water.

As a result, it is no surprise that euphemisms like “the Tree of Life” fill our language, and that trees play a central and symbolic role in all major religions, be it the bodhi tree that the Buddha reached enlightenment beneath, or the Judeo-Christian images of the olive branch and Tree of Knowledge.

I seem to be in implausibly diverse company in my respect for trees’ spiritual nature:

• Willa Cather: I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
   
• George Bernard Shaw: Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
   
• Friedrich Nietzsche: The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait, and both without impatience. They give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
   
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
   
• Mikhail Gorbachev: To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
   
• Ronald Reagan: A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?

Trees give us a model of simplicity, acceptance, and meditative silence. If you searched the world over for the best master meditation guru alive, you could do no better than to follow the example of a tall, strong tree, standing silently while the world flows and transpires all around him.

If I was to be reincarnated after this life is over, I think, contrary to most people’s belief, that coming back as a tree might well be the wisest choice one could make.

And if you were looking for evidence of divinity in our world, I think this is where you should look. Surely the pattern of growth rings in a tree are the literal fingerprints of whatever force—personified or otherwise—created us.