Missed me again (this time)

Looked out the kitchen window this morning and noticed what looked like a small tree in the backyard where none had been before. About 4 feet high, maybe 3 or 4 inches wide. No leaves and no branches were visible.


On closer inspection it was a dead branch that had fallen from high up in one of our maple trees, and landed on its narrower end, so that it had thrust into the lawn about 3 or 4 inches deep. Like a javelin. I could only imagine what it would have done to me had I been mowing or otherwise puttering around out there, like I am wont to do in my dotage. But I wasn’t, so no harm, no foul. But is it a threat? I have reason to begin to feel a bit paranoid.


Some years back I was driving home from work on a sunny, windy autumn day in the midwest, on a neighborhood street. I heard a sudden crash, breaking glass, and a sort of muffled thud. A tree branch, much bigger than the one this morning, had snapped off a tree and burst through the windshield on the passenger side, landing right where the passenger, usually my wife, would have been sitting. Fortunately for her she wasn’t sitting there. But then what if it wasn’t meant for her but for me? It wasn’t that far off from me.


I know it happens. Maybe 40 years ago in my hometown a woman driving home from work got caught in good old Nebraska thunderstorm, and pulled over to let the worst of the storm go past. Suddenly an old maple tree split in the wind, and half of it fell on her car, crushing her.


Doesn’t have to be trees, either. Back in my earliest days I was a news reporter in a small town. Every time the sirens went off I would grab my camera, hop in the car, and try to find out what was happening. One night, around 9 and dark, I followed the rescue squad to the edge of town. This was out in sugar beet country, and it was harvest time. The haulers usually didn’t have enough capacity in their trucks, so they would add a trailer -- a “pup” -- to hold the excess. Well, this night the trailer came unfastened and, unlighted, it swerved across the road where it collided with the passenger side of a pickup truck, neatly removing half the roof of the truck, on the passenger side. And, I discovered later when I developed my photos (shot almost randomly in the dark) neatly removed the head of the woman in that seat.


Finally, in law school, in a trial practice class, our assigned case came in an amply illustrated book. Seems a gentleman was following a flatbed truck with a load of long thin cast iron pipes. You know where this is going. The pipes came loose, and one pierced the windshield; also the guy’s head.


So it sometimes goes.


I guess the moral of this little tale is simply that we never know if there is some inantimate object with our name on it, just lurking and waiting for a chance. And sometimes the aim is good.