Bend Down the Branches

The first time I experienced an ice storm was in Virginia. I remember looking out of my second-floor bedroom window at the tree in our front yard and not quite comprehending what I was seeing. The tree looked wet, sort of, but it was a thick, shimmery wetness. It wasn't until I went outside to investigate that I realized the wetness was ice, that the entire tree was covered in a transparent layer of it. As were the rest of the trees on the street, and the cars, and most exposed surfaces for that matter. I had never seen this before, had never realized it could happen, and of course I did what any native Californian would do and grabbed my camera to capture this odd phenomenon.

Ice storms are fascinating to me because they seem so abnormal, and a bit mind-boggling. I don't know if you can appreciate the mind-boggling-ness of an icestorm unless you've experienced it. It's not like normal ice, which comes either when snow melts and then refreezes, or, more rarely, when rain falls and then the weather turns cold overnight and freezes the daytime puddles. Freezing rain (as I understand it) happens when precipitation begins as snow, encounters warm enough air to turn to rain on the way down, and then encounters cold air still further down which "superfreezes" the rain - it reaches temperatures below the freezing point but stays in supercold liquid form until it hits the ground. Then it freezes on impact and coats everything it touches with ice - tree branches, cars, power lines, chain link fences, bridges, stairs.

It's dangerous. It can take out power, cause traffic accidents, shut down schools and businesses (fortuantely this weekend's ice storm seems to have caused minimal damage).

But it's also beautiful. It has been icing all weekend long, but yesterday morning was the most spectacular. The roads were warm enough to remain clear and so I went out on a run and admired Ann Arbor under ice. Tree limbs shimmered and icicles dripped off of street signs and awnings. Weeds and clumps of grass blossomed like crystals from the dirt at the side of the road. I ran (cautiously) under trees that creaked and groaned and, in some places, bent nearly to the asphalt under the extra weight. I saw other runners darting around fallen branches, an older woman gingerly trodding the frozen grass to avoid the frozen sidewalk, and plenty of cameras aimed at tree limbs. And of course, when I got home, I pulled out my own camera and snapped pictures until I ran out of room on my memory card.

Then today the temperatures plummeted to the teens and so even in the full sun of midday, the ice remained. My fifteen-degree walk home after dark was made that much more bearable by the way the streetlights illuminated the ice-coated branches so that the trees that line every road in Ann Arbor looked like they were made of blown glass. I'm not trying to be poetic in this post - I'm just trying to describe what I'm seeing.

It can't be good for the trees, but I'll be kind of sad when it melts.