Majestic maple collapses during storm

It bowed the utility lines on the opposite side of the street, but somehow didn’t knock out electrical power.

Elsewhere, 51,000 Green Mountain Power customers lost power, and cars went off roads all over the state.

The village was quiet, with few people about, when the tree fell down, but town road crews, police and electrical linemen were arrived quickly, and eventually a few curious onlookers followed, murmuring and taking pictures.

One was Bianca Talarico, whose parents own the property the silver maple stands on, the former Everbank building. She got home only 15 minutes after the tree fell down.

Talarico said her family had invested as much as $10,000 in having the tree mechanically stabilized with thin but strong wires, knowing how big the tree had grown.

“The whole thing was being held together because we knew it was going to crack, but I never though this was going to happen,” Talarico said. “I want to cry about this tree.”

That sentiment was shared by people who responded to pictures of the downed tree on Facebook.

“I loved that tree,” wrote Jennifer Mink.

“So sad but glad nobody was hurt,” wrote Teresa Merelman.

“It was really sad to see such a beloved tree lying in the road,” wrote Kristen Braley, who heard the tree come down as she was walking to Stowe Free Library to return some borrowed materials. She took dozens of photos as town crews arrived to scope out the damage (disclosure: She’s a graphic designer who formerly worked at the Stowe Reporter).

Jacqueline Talarico, who rushed to Park Street after Bianca called her, said she was sad, but happy no one was hurt.

The Stowe Electric Department made sure no one got hurt later, too.

Line workers Evan Bilodeau and Jamie Piper further cemented their crew’s reputation as a skilled high-wire act, arriving in a bucket truck within a half-hour after the tree fell, and going right to work on a giant branch caught in the power lines.

Bilodeau was a surgeon with a chain saw, extricating the branch and leaving the gnarly mess in the road for the morning, when crews from Farr’s Tree Service cleaned up the mess.

Michael Snyder, a Stowe resident who’s commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, said he’d received numerous emails and phone calls bemoaning the loss of a substantial section of the tree. But, he said, it is a tough old tree that has weathered plenty of Vermont winters.

“When you think about it, we’ve had snow and ice and wind a lot in the past, and especially with the geometry of that tree, it’s spreading and arching, and more vulnerable,” Snyder said Wednesday. “It’s amazing that it survived as long as it did, with that form, that elegant, beautiful, sweeping form.”

Tree’s past and future

Charles Lusk, Stowe’s tree warden, said recently he had heard the silver maple was one of the largest and oldest of its species in the state, even after the top 10 feet or so blew out several years ago.

He said it is one of the most remarkable trees in Stowe.

The maple’s trunk is about 4 feet in diameter at the trunk, and it went up only 5 or 6 feet before it started branching out, with huge branches that were themselves trunk-like in their girth. It was so spacious in that upper area that it actually provided enough room for a whole other tree, an ash, growing in it.

“Not only did it do all that gracing the street with its beauty, it also had a whole other ecosystem” in its canopy, Snyder said.

Snyder, who calls himself (and is called by others) a “certified tree freak,” said determining the age of the tree is difficult. It has so many large offshoots that the ring patterns — a chief way to tell a tree’s age is to count its rings — won’t be consistent.

He also believes the tree is not truly done for yet. He hadn’t had a chance to visit the tree before press time, but he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the tree is fine going forward, if the Talaricos give it a little TLC. He said the area where the huge chunk broke off will become like an open wound, an attractive place for insects and fungi to visit, and rot.

But, he said, trees have ways of battling back from those wounds. He said he does not recommend what people did in the old days — filling the gap with concrete or tar or other chemicals — because that hurts the tree’s ability to fight back. He said the Department of Forests offers free consultations to the owners, and as long as the tree is on their property, it will be their call.

He said it’s understandable if people are worried the rest of the tree will come down, and he wouldn’t recommend putting a swing set under it.

“That fear is the fear over every darn tree in Stowe, county and the state,” Snyder said. “We can’t give guarantees, but we know a lot, and we can do a risk assessment, and then it’s the landowners’ decision on how much risk they want to take.”