...The Harder They Fall

Last night, while walking Sparky at 3:00 a.m. near 21st Street and Markham Way, two blocks south of my house in Curtis Park, we stumbled across a chaotic scene with firetrucks and chain saws and rattled people meandering in the street in the dark.

At about 1:30 a.m., a giant branch apparently fell out of a giant tree into the street. "Wow, that white sedan looks pretty bad," I told the Community Services Officer. "That's nothing," she said, "take a look at the camper shell!" Sure enough, the tree had flattened the camper shell on the back of a Datsun pickup truck across the street from the smashed-up white sedan.

It's late spring, nearly summer, the season when sap-loaded tree branches sometimes exceed the structural capacity of the tree itself.

I remember once seeing a tree limb give way, and crash down on 16th Street in Sacramento, just north of J St., fortuitously just after a pulse of traffic had passed by. And once, in 1994, while gazing at my car from a breakfast nook, while eating breakfast on a beautiful windless morning about 7:30 a.m., a limb fell out of a tree and smashed my windshield into a million pieces.

Chicken Little was right, the sky is falling!