storm

Tasmania crouches and blanches beneath nature's hand

Storm

There’s wild weather in Tasmania. For a whole weekend the state crouches and blanches beneath nature’s hand.

As we await the approach, we acclimatize to the heightened wind and rain. Our son goes outside into the tree-free paddocks for ‘extreme kite flying’. The dog and cat stay quietly indoors and keep us company. When the electricity goes off along with the lights and the television, we sit on the sofas and watch the weather from the windows, in between bouts of prepping. This will be a long spell without power.

No power means no cooking. We bring the camping stoves to the kitchen and go to the local petrol station for ice so we can preserve food in Eskies. Ice has sold out within three hours, with one customer buying twenty bags. ‘Big family!’ says the attendant. ‘Or big freezers!’ I joke in return. But it’s no joke, as it leaves many others without.

No power means no water for us as it’s pumped into the house from an underground tank. We have a second water tank attached to our workshop, above ground and with a tap attached, so we fill tanks for washing up and buckets for flushing the toilets and sit them outside the back doors.

As the storm rolls across us like a great celestial unfurling carpet, I wake in the dark of the second night and it’s completely still outside. The weather arrives from the northwest and comes out of nowhere, wind that sounds like a train, lashing rain. I lie in bed listening to the windows creaking, the treetops smashing into each other.

Do windows get blown in by wind? Ours are thin things. They’ve lasted forty years and this is a one in two year storm, the radio has told us. My bed is opposite windows that take the full force of the north-westerly with their flimsy panes. I spend some time picturing the bed littered with shards.

Nature like this brings out catastrophizing tendencies. I picture the trees outside my bedroom, the only one in the house with two external walls. It feels like double the vulnerability. The golden elm in the front yard whose branches would reach the house, no question. They’d smash the gutters and damage the roof. The big blackwood beside the gate whose black busy clouds of foliage I watch in trepidation whenever we go in and out. Opening the gate feels dicey. The first big gum along the verge, with three trunks reaching up to triple the height of our house. My guess it this one is just far enough away. It would fall towards the house, pushed by a northwesterly, probably onto the golden elm, hopefully to be held off the ground. And the house.

We lie in bed hoping none of this happens.

In the mornings we walk out onto the block to see the actual damage, instead the imaginary.

Small branches have peeled off a wattle and a small blackwood in the front yard. A mature wattle has become saturated and toppled across one of the front fences onto the road, open invitation to the goats. Another has fallen across the billy’s fence line, its blossomed head now tangled amongst the wiring. These are my husband’s first priorities in the mornings, chain-sawing to put the tree trunks on either side of the fence and re-erecting the star pickets and wires. Across the road our neighbour has lost a mature gum which has kindly missed the electricity lines as it fell.

Three mature gums are over in our partially cleared block of bushland, the direction of the wind pushing them away from the house. My son heard one of them go, my daughter slept soundly for eleven hours and heard nothing. The trees have fallen onto other trees and are now propped up presenting an ongoing, visible danger, putting strain on their host trees, their diagonal nature flaunting the proper way of nature. We have goats which will mill about below them. It will be too wet and boggy to get big machinery in to take them down for weeks, maybe months.

I find my husband wheeling a barrow full of tree-felling equipment, chainsaw, ear protectors, helmet, through the carnage. He’s been dealing with a mature gum which has fallen across the fence at the back of the property. He stops, his eyes wide, skin flushed with work and wind. The gum smashed a star picket vertically into the earth so that only a few inches remain visible above ground, he tells me. With trees down from previous storms and from clearing around the workshops, it’s carnage in the block now, well beyond one man and his chainsaw for clearing up.

I take the dog for walks along the verge on the far side of the road. There’s no chance of walking on our usual path, off the road and beneath the trees. We stay upwind of them, but beneath the power lines. Falling branches would go the other way in the wind. Such are the calculations we make to walk the dog, trudging along when the weather eases momentarily.

We lose power for three days. We stay warm as we have a wood heater, and spend our days finding candles, carting water, bringing wood to the house. This is why people had domestic servants before automation made everything quicker and easier, because fending for ourselves take the whole day. As evening approaches, the prospect of putting on bright lights is not there and it’s a depressing moment when you suddenly remember. We have one evening where we lounge around on the sofas in front of the fire, chatting idly, and it’s lovely. We cook on the camp-stoves by candlelight, which gradually loses its romance. Slowly the contents of our fridge and freezers turn to sludge.

As the storm front passes and we’re able to get out of the house again, my husband becomes more despondent than I’ve ever seen him about how much clearing up there is to do. My employer’s Safety Officer circulates an email from WorkSafe Tasmania about precautions during the clear-up. Look after your mental health, it urges, as it is common to feel overwhelmed and have a dramatic emotional response to storm events such as this.

When the television comes back on we see what others are going through. As the power company struggles to prioritise where power should be restored first, communities in remote locations wait for a week and more. An elderly couple in Waratah sit by a bright window wearing dressing gowns over their clothes, all their refridgerated and frozen food ruined, no heating, living on vegemite sandwiches. An elderly man outside Deloraine vents his frustration on the radio that nobody has tapped him on the shoulder to find out how he’s doing and tell him when power will be returned and this will all end.

Later in the week, the rain returns. Water fills the roadside paddocks and culverts again, lapping at the tarmac, edging across it and daring us to drive slowly past. Reaching home, I fill buckets from the taps, watching the water flow easily and giving silent thanks for it. I put the buckets outside the back doors, ready to fill cisterns. I bring the camp stove out of storage again and make sure candles stand ready. Just in case.

If you live in Tasmania, you have to be prepared.

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