Beat up

One of the most astounding descriptions of early Orange City is the one from an early land grabber who said that when he arrived at the place those four gentlemen from Marion County had specified as home for a new colony, when he surveyed the land way out there in northwest Iowa, what was remarkable was the the vast, limitless grassland that included only one tree--one tree as far as he could see.

We get occasional reminders of the old days when fierce winds topple trees decades old, as they did a week ago--Monday night, when 100-mile an hour winds rip things up or pull up trees by snapping them off right at the roots. 

What's left in the wake is totem sculpture that would make a wonderful garden of images if we'd let them all be. But they're grotesque, even horrifying reminders of how quickly they can be shaved from sites trunks they've grown for decades, sometime centuries. There no more native here than we are. We're all immigrants.

The shot beneath here is our old house, where we lived for almost thirty years before moving out to the country. This maple was terribly scarred by dangerous winds it's suffered for decades. I once told a man from Denver, a real estate guy, that I really ought to get rid of the thing because a gallery of broken limbs made it, to me at least, almost  distorted or deformed. He shook his head. "I know people in Denver who'd give hundreds, even thousands of dollars for that maple," he said.

As  of last Monday night, the old misshapen maple will be no more.

I've lived in Alton for the last 12 or 13 years, but close enough to Orange City to feel the enthusiasm that community generates for its annual Tulip Festival--it's huge. Tons of small towns in America would give up a lot of their own history to come up with a holiday that annually draws tens of thousands of people. 

You could rally up an old rivalry by telling Orange City people that Sioux Center suffered more destruction than they did last week. Weighing the difference is not about to happen, as much joy as that kind of tallying might bring to an old, old rivalry. What is clear, however, is that Orange City lost a lot of the shade around its iconic center, a park in midtown that got beat up worse than any other street or avenue.

In Sioux Center, my grandchildren's house (just below), just off Main, got by without much  horror. The wind scooped out a dead ash root ball and made it easy to cut up, helped them along really. 

Both communities are suffering the effects of the ash borer, a cruel visitor who lays its eggs on the bark of an ash tree and sends its minions, thereby, into the trees innards, where they munch down what they can and eventually thereby starve the tree to death. Not pretty. Check out my grandson-in-law's work just over the eastern peak of the house--all dead long before the storm.

Dead ash line the streets here, as they do in Orange City, and the wind didn't blow down the skeletons because there was nothing to stop it. Both towns looked significantly worse during the week past because all those dead ash trees, or most of them anyway, didn't come down, while their healthy neighbors were tipped up and out of the ground or stripped into naked statues.

Who had it worse--Sioux Center or Orange City? As in all things, they tally pretty much the same. The storm's 100-mile winds tore through both towns, leaving its scarred footprints in every neighborhood.

Most Dutch-Americans I know are fastidious to a fault. A week later, trust me, both towns are pretty much cleaned up. 

Who was faster? A week later, I'm thinking that if  you would ask that question in some local coffee shops, you'd beg a fight.