If you’re flying over the part of North Carolina where I live, you’ll see what looks to be a few little settlements just hacked out of a thick forest. And that’s pretty much what’s going on here. Woodland creatures, building their little roads and buildings, but always surrounded by trees. Huge, hulking trees. Watching, waiting, poised to strike.
Which seems to be what happened in Durham, where a tree barely missed in its attack on a passing SUV.
Like everything in modernity, it was captured on video, so we get to watch this exciting skin-of-the-valves escape of a Chevy Tahoe from that brutal elm or oak or whatever:
Daaaaaaamn, that was close. I mean, look at this:
I can’t quite tell if some branches caught the SUV on the tail end of the roof just a bit. I am surprised that we didn’t see a more aggressive stomping on the gas to get the hell away from that massive falling tree, too.
Since I’m no longer an arborist (the arborism firm I worked for said I “knew nothing about trees” and so that was reason enough to fire me, somehow, which is bullshit) I’m not sure why that huge tree decided to fall. But if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it was out of raw tree-rage. Saplust, we used to call it over at the Needle and Cone, my favorite evergreen bar when we’d talk shit about the deciduous geeks.
So, if you live in a heavily wooded area like this, be careful. The trees are huge and everywhere and often violent. Plus, I recently learned that they’re all made of lumber, and as you know that shit is heavy and hard.