Tolkkinen: Bemidji will go on, but dang we’ll miss all those trees

BEMIDJI, MINN. - First we snapped photos.

The big-tooth aspen, the spruce and the red oak lying flat across the front yard like soldiers felled in battle. The ruination of our lovely little woods in the back.

Then we walked around the house where we lived for the first years of our marriage and still own. A neighbor had already texted us that the house had survived the hurricane-force winds that swept Bemidji early Saturday morning, but we had to see it for ourselves.

Next we unloaded the car. The coolers with plenty of ice and food and what we thought was too much water (but wasn’t enough), the chain saws, the sleeping bags and pillows. The house is between renters. There’s no furniture in it at the moment. No beds. No dishes. We ate off a yogurt lid and out of a glass bowl from the cooler.

There was also no power, just like thousands of other homes in the area. It could be a week, maybe more, before everybody has power. When you drive around town, you can understand why. Powerlines sag like an unraveling garment. Unnervingly, they lie on the roadway by Bemidji State University. One broke away from the power pole and stretched across our neighbor’s lawn.

In a disaster area, there’s nothing to do but get to work, if you are able. And crack jokes, like the guy on Facebook offering a slightly damaged trampoline for sale. Buyers would presumably have to unwind it from the utility pole themselves.

When volunteers arrive in a disaster zone, their minds and hearts are open to helping people with whatever they need. But on Sunday, when a neighbor came over talking about how her car is still blocked in, my husband started to volunteer to help and I cut him off.

“We can’t help, honey. We have our own work to do.”

Immediately I felt like a heel for embarrassing our neighbor and silencing my husband. I tried to remind myself of what a Salvation Army leader told our crew of volunteers heading to help the Fargo-Moorhead area after the 1997 flood. People who live in disaster zones are stressed. Let them lash out if they need to. While we don’t live in Bemidji, nobody else was going to clean up our property there, and I was stressed.

The guilt still lingers, though.

We trudged through the heat and humidity, pausing often to mop our faces, as we chainsawed the trees that had once provided shade, privacy, and nesting, and carried logs and limbs to the edge of the yard. We have an acre of land. We didn’t even get to the trees in the back half of it, not even the one on the septic system. We might just let most of them lie there and rot like a natural forest would, supporting the ecosystem around it. There’s no loss without some gain, as they say, and all those seedlings have gained all the sunshine they want. We spotted several juvenile spruce trees already on their way up, too small for the winds to bother.

You think about things when cleaning up after a disaster. About the people whose homes are now covered with fallen trees. About the electrical linemen working 16-hour days. About climate change, and how weird everything has been lately, with that 90-degree weather back in May (96 in International Falls!) and the Canadian wildfire smoke choking the entire state a few weeks ago, and the tornadoes last week in Crow Wing and Cass counties.

You think about how insurance companies are leaving states with high climate risks and wonder whether they’ll jack the rates for homeowners in northern Minnesota, or if they’ll consider the weekend’s derecho a freak event unlikely to recur.

“My body hurts,” I told my husband, after the umpteenth load of brush. “So does mine,” he said. He was recovering from an infected root canal. When our skin felt too hot, we ducked into the house and perched on the coolers. We didn’t feel sorry for ourselves. We knew how fortunate we were. We had seen the tipped-over semitruck and the squashed cars and pile of bricks that had fallen off MJB appliance store.

We had the strength and the stamina and the tools to do the work. So back out we went.

That’s when we saw them.

In a long-dead tree, a bird squawked. There, way up high, was an adult pileated woodpecker, but he wasn’t the squawker. Poking its head out of a hole in the tree was its redheaded baby. That little family had survived Category 3 hurricane winds in a dead tree some 30 feet in the air. Now the baby was demanding food, keeping its parent busy, and we paused for a moment, watching. Just like Bemidjians, they were going about their lives, doing what needed to be done. Disaster or not.