Beautiful Destruction

Little did I imagine just how ominous John's statement would be Saturday night when we were in the Loblaw's parking lot at 10pm awestruck over the beauty of the sparkling backlit ice covered trees. Here I am admiring the chandelier look of the tree branches laden with ice and he mentions that if there is too much ice on them the weight will break the branches of a lot of trees. Me? I was all gung ho about going out the next day to get some real photos as opposed to the crappy cell phone images we got while out shopping. I was so worried it'd all be gone. Wow, little did we know :-(

It is like a war zone out there. Silly as we see it now, safe in our condo viewing the images, I was bent on going to Rosetta McClean Gardens to take some shots of ice laden dead flowers, trees, pine trees, berry bushes and such. Getting out to Ellesmere we run into the first of a series of non working street lights. A few more lights and I am now thinking "we are morons, this is stupid". As I entered the older more home areas along Midland we realized the magnitude of the destruction that surrounded us. Really, overlooking a major mall out our condo windows, we really had no idea :-( My jaw hung open as we passed literally hundreds and hundreds of downed huge tree branches, power lines swinging in big arched curves and wrapped around huge piles of fallen tree branches, huge limbs across the right lane and countless spots of chaos. Tree branches hung down almost to the roof of any cars passing below in the right hand lane closest to the curb. Stupidly, the occasional car zoomed through a major intersection, not caring about the "treat it as a 4 way stop" law. The only smash up we saw was some BMW sedan in a small intersection on Brimley, and these intersections were actually a Relief compared to the major intersections.

We made it to Rosetta. It was unbelievable. Tree branches were everywhere. We did not go very far into the park. The crackle of the high swaying branches was scary enough but at least 5 times a huge thunder crack could be heard and within viewing range, down came huge branches from these old trees. Sadness is what I felt seeing some of these magnificent trees being felled by the ice which had built up on their branches.

Juxtaposed with all this destruction we couldn't help but say "isn't that Gorgeous" pretty much every few minutes. Little gems of jewelled stems, leaves, berries, pine branches, grasses, etc. were everywhere to be seen. We had to crunch our boots down hard in the surface to make sure we could walk ok. We also were scared and thrilled at the same time because any time we had no choice but to cross under a large tree with ice laden branches, we realized really, how silly we probably were and how chancy this was. We did not venture near the huge trees deeper into the park and we stayed mainly around the entrance fence and in open areas.

Though this was probably not one of the wisest photography choices I've made, I somehow am glad I saw this, was out in it, because I would never have realized the impact of this what seemed like a nothing storm, never have actually seen the destruction that some people had to endure to their homes, cars, beautiful trees, churches, businesses, and everywhere one turned. It truly was unbelievable.

These photos and the beauty in them belie the true awfulness that we saw in order to be able to take them.