Bandwidth
In October of 2020, exactly four days before Halloween, the sky in central Oklahoma opened up and ice gushed out. No trees had even begun to lose their leaves yet, as the average temperature that fall had been 73 degrees. (Oklahoma’s weather is nothing if not bi-polar.) The rain started in quasi pellets, melty ice drops that clung to everything they touched. And it just kept falling into and throughout the night.
As the ice mixed with rain poured down like salt from a shaker whose holes are too big, the lush vegetation absorbed it all like a sponge, while temperatures continued to hover around that dangerous rain-ice line. Power lines buckled under the weight of the accumulating moisture. Roofs leaked and caved. And though trees fought with all their bound sinew, they were no match for the army of precipitation falling from the sky. Their audible cracks and splinters echoed through the dark.
Morning’s light gave us a damage report--it was as bad as we had imagined and getting rapidly worse. But my eyes weren’t really required for surveying, I could feel the wreckage in my bones. My backyard of oaks and maples looked like a war zone littered with carnage. Pieces and parts of living things were scattered everywhere. Things you can’t rebuild.
Large branches full of green foliage encased in ice lay crisscrossed on the ground like frozen wedding cake being saved for the celebration of year one. A couple of giant oaks had been wildly maimed already, and the ones that hadn’t yet collapsed under the weight they carried were bowing, their backs arched like an elderly, decrepit man.
And this was just the appetizer. The main course was coming in the distance. You could hear it on all sides from miles away: ckkkkk boom! Ckkkkk boom! Amidst the constant pepper of sleet, came what sounded like rounds of gunfire interspersed by canons ricocheting around the neighborhood. I ran shrieking from window to window through my house as giant trees and power poles crashed outside of every glass I looked. We’d been crawling through a global pandemic—this felt like Armageddon, a violent finale to a pretty crappy year.
Then it was over. And we were left with the ugly that remained.
Everybody in the neighborhood did the best they could. We all pulled up our bootstraps and began dragging, clearing and piling the debris the storm had left behind. Once we’d done all we could do, we called in those with bucket trucks and ropes and ladders to help us clean up the wounds we couldn’t reach. We mourned our disfigured landscape—the oaks who’d lost an arm, the cypress that stayed bent.
Eventually, the sun came out and dried up all the rain. Before we knew it, it was spring. Miraculously, the trees rallied, especially in the broken spots. Everywhere there was a gap where the top had broken off or a major branch had split and had to be removed, new shoots of growth went crazy. Tufted mounds of green rushed to the rescue like new skin to heal a wound. It was remarkable, really, the way these living beings regenerated to take care of themselves.
Some trees faltered with injuries too immense and obvious to overcome, but many soldiered on, inspiring us with their toughness and resilience. They looked different, but they seemed to be thriving. Like most things after Covid, what was normal was new.
Time marched on. The clock spun and the calendar flipped. The trees continued to rebound, filling in and filling out.
Then came the devil’s brother, the summer of 2022.
Here in Oklahoma, we’ve had record breaking triple digits and weeks upon weeks of compounding drought. As a result, everything that lives outdoors is suffering. Every day on my regular route, I discover a tree that wasn’t dead the day before. One day it’s green just like its neighbors, and the next day it sticks out like a sore thumb, its leaves a crispy shade of tan.
Little left to fight with, the fragile just succumb.
A commonality almost always connects the ones that go. The ones that saw the most damage in the massive ice storm simply struggle to hang on. Though their limbs were cleanly severed and their deadwood was cut away, it seems they lost too much of themselves to fight again. Even though on the outside, they appeared to be doing fine.
Sometimes there is no hard evidence when enough becomes too much.
Maybe trees have a bandwidth like people do. A protective swath of energy or capacity that helps them deal with hard. Healthy bandwidths are rich and supple. They stretch and expand growing to meet needs and deal with change. A healthy bandwidth has transformative power because it houses give. When trouble comes, the hit can be absorbed—maybe even disarmed and depleted. But when bandwidth shrinks, what’s left becomes tight and brittle. It no longer has the dimension for catching things and covering them in bubble wrap to lessen the damage of their blow. With pliability gone, the challenges hit hard and burrow deep.
The result is often disaster. When bandwidth gets used up, what’s living has no tools for dealing with the newest threatening foe.
I’m not sure which trees will be going next. Bandwidth is not discernable to the naked eye. They’re all, however—regardless of how they might appear—undoubtedly stressed to ridiculous extremes. The best I can do is pray for grace. A reprieve from the repetitive wham-bam-slam from the weather and the world. A chance to take a break, let their bandwidth grow strong and supple again, so that they might live to fight another day.