Author’s Note: this piece was originally published on Vocal.
Colorado is known for some wild and crazy windstorms. Almost every year we get jolted awake by some gust of wind that hits our house like a cargo truck. It's the same every time. We go to bed in quiet and peace, living close to the front range where lots of big city noises are relatively few. But then, oh yes, then! I don't know why it gets me every time, either. We've been here about ten years, and every Fall and Spring it's the same thing. Even though we should be used to it by now, the wind never fails to keep us up with some new oblique angle, some new way of hitting the house with a sound quality that's just different enough to give our idling minds some reason to pop out of drifting off to some far away and exotic locale, which can be had, with an albeit limited supply, of Southwest airline points.
Last year was no slouch either. After nearly a decade of Rocky Mountain windstorms already under our belt, we awoke one night to what amounted to a cold, inland hurricane pawing greedily at the eaves of our roof while simultaneously commencing work on remodeling our fences. The property our house sits on is not big, so it's easily surrounded by redwood slats that have hitherto withstood a few decades of this treatment. Everything eventually gives in though, with enough consistency, just look at river rocks, and redwood is no exception. And even though I couldn't see the whole thing unfolding in the middle of the night, the morning light would make plain what I'd assumed.
Large portions of fence had become dislodged, swinging freely like the door of a Vegas bull-rider's stall, while a quickly diminishing portion of wood pulp held things together at the base. The wind was much slower the next morning, probably clocking in around the mid-forties, but its power lay in the fact that it was relatively sustained. Lots of things don't like swinging back and forth wildly and this list includes, of course, the usual suspects like wood and metal. Let's just say that when the next evening rolled over, the entire yard would not be prepared for what came next. Weather reports would later say that we sustained close to one-hundred mile per hour gusts again that next night, but the fences didn't care about the numbers.
Fences only care about a few things. From what I can tell, it's mostly heat, moisture, and some form of pressure. So basically just like the rest of the Universe. But that's no consolation when you've got to run out in the middle of a dying gale and secure sections of fence that would not think twice about gashing an arm or leg with their unhinged nails and jagged wood parts. What you'd do is throw them down in a haphazard pile, eight-foot sections at a time, close to where they'd been sheared off. And if that wasn't enough, you'd leave them there for like six months until you could figure out what to do with them. You'd probably have thoughts about the sheer work involved in hauling them away, with all the prep involved and odd sharp bits.
You might even start imagining what your yard would look like if they became a permanent fixture. It's not so bad, you'd tell yourself, and then just when you'd come to grips with the plan, your wife would probably stare directly into your soul and politely (maybe) explain that they would not be staying in the yard much past the next week. Yes, you might have an experience like that, and so it was with me, last year when the most interesting weather phenomenon Colorado has likely seen since the Paleolithic area came whipping through our backyard.
See, apparently what happened, according to a meteorological article someone sent me, is that the Stratosphere decided to go skydiving right into the Troposphere. Apparently some people have heard that this was on the Stratosphere's bucket list for some time, but I was not aware of that fact. Much less the fact that this can even happen. But according to weather people that seem pretty smart and who now know about using Artificial Intelligence and other algorithms with big clusters of computers in the “cloud” of all things, this is precisely what happened. I'm not going to get all science-y here, but the upper atmosphere, including some really fast winds you probably have heard of, the Jet Stream, decided it might be nice to fold downward and drag all of its upper atmosphere-y-ness with it right down into our neighborhood on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
I know we live in a great place, right near the veritable rock and roll hall of fame called Red Rocks Amphitheater, but what I didn't know is that the Jet Stream had any interest in all this. What with all its snooty upper level wind and all, I'd assumed that we weren't really on its radar, but geesh, was I wrong. Anyway, long story long, the windstorm of the century flattened all of our fences. So now we needed to figure out what to do with all the cedar wood laying splintered around our yard.
Now, I must admit, I can be crafty at times, but it's not usually my first inclination. I've never been one of those guys on YouTube that takes a slice of an old log and pours fabulous looking epoxy into the holes, smooths it all out whilst confidently narrating the process from his amazing-garage-workshop and then sells the piece for 10k to some eager collector. So, slow as I was to come up with this idea, I did eventually land on a great concept after first mulling all the other options plus allowing the wood to sit there for enough time that I was entirely compelled to make a change of some kind or face certain wrath.
I had a great thought, what if I made something new from the old? What if I could transform this calamity into something productive? And now looking back I'm reminded of what a famous person once said, "To those who have, more will be added. But to those that don't have, even what they have will be taken". Of course, I've always thought that famous person was being rather harsh on this point. Why take something away from someone if they don't even have anything? Good grief, it's like, hey looks like you're down to your last whatever, excuse me while I take that too. Furthermore, that guy over there who has a bunch, I'll just give it to him instead.
It all sounds very depressing and rather mean, but the other day I was thinking about the chicken coop I built from the fence, and then it hit me! And yes, I spent all that time meandering to this point only to mention in passing that I built a chicken coop from the broken fence. And yes, it's really fabtabulous. We get five eggs a day now, though it would have been six, but one of our chicks ended up being a rooster. I'll wait until I can come up with the spiritual significance of this to write more about it. For now, let me just point out that while I was on a run the other day, thinking about our beautiful, eccentric, rustic chicken fence-coop, and it finally came to me.
I'd been on track to throw all that lumber away, and if I'd done that, even what I had would have been gone. Instead, here's this amazing coop with living, breathing hens giving us more eggs than we know what to do with. Seems like we went from what appeared to be a real loss, to a bona fide gain. So because we started with what we had, the broken fence pieces, and built them into something else, we ended up with demonstratively more than we had in the beginning. Now we have a new fence thanks to the marvel of modern insurance coverage, it's the least they could do, but we also have a new chicken coop that helps with feeding our family.
To recap, we could have thrown the wood away, and even what we had would have been gone. But since we started with what we had, more was added to what we have. And that right there, folks, that's all about perspective. And I'd love to get all gloaty and imagine that I'm the kind of guy that always makes these kinds of decisions, but in reality, we were just floating along the river of life like everyone else, taking what came, and it turns out that the way that we react to things, the way that we frame things in our minds really does matter. Oh! I know you already know that, you read all kinds of articles and so do I. But do we really know it? I know I didn't until the Jet Stream blew my fence down.