That Bloody Sunday

The bathroom was due for a clean up, the fly tying bench had lost its orderly appearance and was spilling off-cuts and fluff, and there were piles of clean laundry needing putting away on a bed needing changing. With Cerys Mathews on the Radio to keep me company I got myself in gear for a productive few hours, knowing the more I achieved now, the more deserved and smugly worthy I would feel the reward of a casting practice session later when this weather had passed through, as inevitably it would.

Habitat work put to bed for a few months now I could concentrate on my casting, fly tying and maybe even Gawd forbid, some rod building.

As I came down stairs from a now immaculate bathroom ( mfor a bachelor pad) and an orderly and aired bedroom complete with fresh bedding  and a fastidiously vacuumed carpet, done and definitely dusted! I was looking forward to the miraculous transformation that was about to occasion itself upon the Kitchen and some resultant, gleaming shiny surfaces.

I looked out of the window for a progress report, and it was now sheeting down with rain from a heavy leaden sky, I could see bullying in the bottom border of the garden where our trees were being tugged and tussled in every direction, cruelly shredding them of some older leafs and newly grown tender shoots, while tossing them wastefully into the wind.

I’d made the right call today it had become beastly. Hopefully by tea time it will have blown through and I’d be out there pursuing perfect loops; or I’d be still stuck inside, moving onto writing invoices and catching up with some design work.

Heaven possibly; or the comparative hell of an entire day shut up indoors, lay ahead of me.

As it was, it blew through earlier than expected… and ‘My,Oh-my’! How it blew through!

One minute I was listening to some old  Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy Blues music, courtesy of the wonderful Cerys, while shining up the chrome stove top next to the now immaculately shining espresso machine twinkling and sparkling under the kitchen lights. The next second there was a deep booming Whooooop followed by a thump and then a crash. It wasn’t just sound in my ears, that “whoop/thump”was also a feeling of the air around me and an adjustment to my chest like catching breath. No Levee broke for me to make me weep and moan, but those southern Blues still paid a personal visit to my humble abode.

I’ve never been in an explosion, not that this sensation was as violent as that, or scary as I imagine such a terrible blast. It was a novel and unnerving feeling of a sudden radical change in the atmosphere, a little uneasy quantum leap into a new troublesome dimension, and something that felt like it deserved to be urgently concerned about. A whiff and a hint of immediate damage limitation required. Cerys and the old blues lady faded out to be replaced by the sound of a roaring, howling, whistling wind, and clinking and crashing and violent banging. I shot up the stairs to the source of this mysterious change, pumping the banister rail and leaping those treads two at a time.

The air on the landing was full of swirling leafs and fine debris, as I entered the bedroom it was covered in leafs and twigs and soot and soil swirling around and settling on everything. The bedroom window, that a minute or so ago had been closing out the cruel elements, had somehow blown open and was swinging wildly on its hinges and now inviting those elements in. Panicked that the glass might smash, I grabbed it quickly and pulled it back into its frame, jammed down the latches. I could barely see across the road in the dark and driving rain. I briefly noticed the dark silhouettes of tall trees opposite pressed into angles I had never seen them bend before or imagined possible, before being violently tugged back into the opposite direction.

In that brief moment that I was outside of the window frame wildly grabbing for the flapping window I was instantaneously soaked to the skin. I looked and felt like someone had tossed an ice cold bucket of water my way, and scored a direct hit! I hadn’t noticed the roaring of the wind and rain, until the shutting window killed its volume, cut off the sound, and a loud peace smothered the maelstrom.

Window secured I tramped through to the bathroom, and it was transformed. The Bedroom had been a scene of Autumnal devastation of leafs and twigs and driving rain, the white of my bathroom however was a dark layer of hell, sooty black and as my eyes adjusted and I cleaned the rain off my glasses the best I could, I saw it actually was dotted with small specks of masonry mix, grit, old plaster, animal hair and ashes. “ where in hell’s name had that come from?” Fire and brimstone would hardly have been more surprising.

The Window was reassuringly closed fast, but up above the bath in the ceiling where once sat a loft hatch was now an empty frame to a dark abysmal gloom. The loft, an access to a small space; tiny, impractical to reach; and offering a small triangle of gap under the oak struts and rafters of the old Collyweston sandstone roof above. In the time I’d lived there I had never opened that trap door to say “Hello, how ya’doin?” and the years of accumulated old dust and probably eighteenth century builders debris had now come down, uninvited, to visit me first.

I stood on the rim of the bathtub and looked up in the hatch, there was no sign of light leaking from the roof itself, the heavy old sandstone tiles and thick lime mortar had weathered the storm. I fished around with my hand in the dark, felt cold drafts of air, and caught hold of the edge of the missing hatch door and pulled it back shut. The wind must have got under the edge of the heavy tiles by the guttering and blasted through.

Cerys would be leaving Radio 6 for the afternoon soon, I’d have to rely on Guy Garvey to get me through this tidy up. By the look of the size of the task, I’d probably still be clearing up when Iggy Pop came on in a few hours’ time; Tom Robinson, and right through until Don Letts Culture Clash Radio brought the midnight hour in.

My next thought was the Brook, a storm like that on branches still covered in leafs would find any weakness in the structure of the woodland  community along the bankside. In recent years we’d lost some good older Willows in storms. The trunks too big to move, remained in the stream scouring out deep pools, and enhancing the variety of habitat. The gaps left in the Sylvan community however, by those fallen, now left spaces like a hole in a scrum, or a missing spartan shield. The defences breached for the wind to work into and push from angles these trees had never needed to protect. I feared I would have a few more branches and trees down and was desperate to see how my stream and its inhabitants had faired .

Having been through a close scrape with a hurricane in Queensland, and I knew I had just bizarrely been through similar in Oundle. Was it worse down in Fotheringhay where the Brook was, or had we caught the brunt here a few miles away?

My previous encounter in Australia had a brief period of marvellous clear calm, of blue skies and gentle breeze to observe the devastation, before an even stronger, darker tempest returned and really smashed into us, and we realised the first assault was merely a dress rehearsal and hint of the real punishment to follow.

In less than an hour in Oundle after my cottages ‘make over’, the skies were clearing, and patches of blue were growing and joining up, the wind had dropped to a whimper as we enteredour calm after the storm. A brief chance maybe to escape from that devastation in the bathroom and shut the door on the chaos until later. Not knowing if after this calm, worse was to come. It wasn’t thankfully, This was no cyclone or hurricane eye passing over us. But was, it turned out, an unlikelyTornado that had passed through.

The back road out of the town had its ‘Road closed’ signs up already and in the distances you could hear the sounds of a chorus of different breeds of chainsaws in full voice. What vehicles moving around, were Environment agency trucks, tree surgeons and farmers.. I took the main A road and tried another route to the Brook past a village where I knew a community minded tree surgeon lived. Sure enough some big old Oaks and Ash that had been part of the old hedgerows were down and had come across the road , but as I suspected, someone had been quickly out with a saw and truck already and opened up the route .

The road to the next village had a few smaller trees and larger branches down, I got out at one stage to pull some large sycamore branches off the road as far as I could get them, enough at least for a vehicle to pass. As I entered the village of old stone, thatched, or Collyweston roofed, cottages.Fotheringhay was home to the lower reaches of our Brook’s fishing stretch, there was no obvious signs of damage but there were the revving whiny sounds of a few saws at work in some properties around. There would be no shortage of fire wood for some folks this year!

At the bottom of our stretch of the Brook you would cross over the hump of Nassington road bridge to park-up in a farm gate entrance under a huge old oak. A tree of that ancient age where the branches start to die back into ghostly white stag horn spurs, as the tree reaches its later stage of life; its final few hundred years. It’s hard to imagine how many generations of man had passed that Oak, possibly there since the Tudors, and how the map and politics of the world had changed during its growth. How many violent storms it had safely weathered, until now.

Before I crossed the bridge I could see in unaccustomed light, the sickening warm/ brown, ragged scars, of freshly exposed ripped tissue against the saturated dark bark, as most of the large old branches had been wrenched from the trunk, some on the floor making a mockery of the fence and hedge boundary below, crushing everything we had foolishly considered protective and permanent.

Most of the high canopy and that deep welcome shade it had offered, now gone for good. Some branches still teetering dangerously unattached, but caught in the remaining lowercanopy and waiting, pausing for the right gust of wind or snapped tissue, to tumble them down finally to earth or whatever was helplessly caught underneath at that eventful moment.

Looking up at them they looked smaller but heavy, pitching back and forth , the tree creaking under the strain, but I knew from experience when faced directly on the ground and needing to deal with them, there was a quarter of a ton, or very much more, of chunky, car crushing jeopardy swinging in that breeze. I parked opposite safely away from the tree and picked my way through the debris, gingerly glancing upwards, and flinching with each overhead creak. To get to the Brook I had to pass under these hanging limbs, up to my thighs in the tangled fallen debris of smashed branches and twigs, there was no quick escape route to consider.

The barren fields to the right that were barely showing the first green signs of growth in the winter crop, but my view was arrested with the sight of the tops of trees that had been severed from the canopy and were now laying like van sized tumble weeds far, far, from the woods they had left . Either they had carried fifty yards or more by the wind and landed there, or had snapped off and driven along by the down draft rolling across the field until the force finally dissipated and they found rest. There were about a dozen of these, some eight to ten feet high, dotted along the fields into the distance. Close-by to my left  a younger Ash tree had lost some branches that were now blocking the Brook up completely, further along a huge Willow branch had smashed down across the banks and onto the field blocking the path. I set off on my walk upstream.

Weeks later working in the Brook I spoke to a man who had been walking his little dog and got as far as where this Willow branch came down early into his walk. He said when he started his walk it was a bit windy and there was a bit of rain, but not too much to turn back. The dog always seemed to relish a bit of wild weather he added, and it blew away his cobwebs. I wondered if the dog would still be so care free in future.

“When the Tornado came we had nearly reached that Willow and the wind and rain just hit, it came on so quick. The Willow crashed down it was a hell of a sound and the air was full of leafs and rain, it felt so close we could feel the ground shake.  The tree next to it then lost a branch with an almighty crack and I thought I’d better get us back to the road and turned back towards the gate avoiding the trees, then that big Oak by the gate just seemed to explode in front of us and came crashing down. We trudged into the middle of the field and stood, soaking wet, watching for flying branches and waited until the winds settled and we could finally escape. The tops of Willows meanwhile were being ripped off one by one, as the weather travelled up stream, and blown across the field in the distance.”

By the time I had reached the last bends below the Packhorse bridge on my inspection, that place where the digger had focused and where I had just spent three long days working on the gravels for the redds. Now that whole area was obscured with a tangle of trunks and branches and foliage, not a ripple of water to be spied below for many yards, no sign of all that heartfelt personal endeavour remained, I was feeling about as crushed as the farm gate under that Oak.

I took a photo on my phone but it could not convey the shear amount of material that had come down, but I had a grasp now of the extent of the damage and enormity of the task ahead and rung the treasurer of the fishing club .

“Bill I’m down on the banks of the Brook we’ve a problem, we’ve got trees and some very heavy branches down”.

He seemed more interested in the problemed outlook of his own world though at that moment, and went on to tell they had had some strong gusts of wind (about 15 miles away) and there were some snapped branches on an Apple tree and rubbish bins blown over .  It was evident they had been on the edge of what had hit us and he didn’t get the enormity of this, or of what I was saying.

He thought we could wait till winter and the farmer could get them out, or we could get a working party on a Sunday morning or two to clear out the materials.

I tried to correct him without sounding like a drama queen .

“Bill I’ve walked from the road bridge to almost the Packhorse. I was lucky to get here most of the roads are blocked off. That big old ancient Oak at the bridge is down, blocking the parking and has closed the road to Nassington, but that’s the least of our worries.

There are four big, entire trees, down in the Brook and spanning over its banks and around twelve places where huge branches have jammed across and made it impassable. There is so much jammed up in the water with more debris likely to come down, we are going to lose the banks in places. Those Redds that I’d been working on are mostly blocked up with timber and leafs.  Most of the flow deflectors are covered up and probably crushed. Pretty soon the Brooks going to find a way around them and start cutting new channels undercutting the banks

Or in the worst cased scenario; if we get some big winter floods this year that starts carrying this stuff along, ripping out years and years of our work, the flow deflectors and bank protection; collecting and accumulating as it goes until eventually they’ll be tonnes of large woody debris smashing into the old stone bridge threatening to wipe it away!”

“Well Chris we’ll just have to get the farmer to pull it out or get a tree surgeon”

“ …it looks to me from here Bill, like half of the farmer’s roof has gone on the big barn, I doubt if the Brook is going  to be very high on his list of priorities with his farm tracks also blocked. I can see from here big trees down over the bridal path. In any case if they pull them out with machines there’s no telling what damage they will cause to the banks and our in-stream structures. We need to find a way of dealing with this in the club”.

“What about hiring in a Tree surgeon and share costs with the landowner?”

“Same problem of damage, and there’s no access close at present for the trucks. The other thing is that I have seen so many mature trees down and on the roads, goodness knows what its like in people’s gardens and the vulnerable trees around the properties, there won’t be a tree surgeon available in the area for months, not even the cowboys! Can we not please organise some work parties from the members and pull in people on the waiting list?”

As this conversation was developing I realised it was really valuable to me to get my thoughts in order. My mood was changing as it dawned, that this cloud had one hell of a silver lining. Large woody debris and many tonnes of it had been delivered by the river gods, not as some trial and punishment but a wonderful gift, spread fairly evenly along the length of the Brook. It was for us to take advantage of. What we needed to do was merely edit it down, cut and clear off the excess and leave it in neat piles on the banks, and then manipulate what was left into useful positions and then anchor it down.

Our own blessing from above. The last thing we needed was the farmer mechanically ‘helping’ unless he was just happy to come along and clear up our piles of waste.. which is pretty much how it went., and which gained us a grateful farmer too. 

Life delivered us lemons, so I spent a winter making lemonade.

By the end of that conversation I felt so ‘up’ and full of enthusiasm…. Then remembered the bathroom and sodden bed waiting at home!

Have a happy Sunday, not a bloody Sunday, and have a great week ahead.

Chris Avery.