Ice Storm Takes a Toll on Oklahoma Trees

The trees of Memory Lane, sturdy as the soldiers they were planted to honor, once were majestic. Now they are heartbreaking.

They teeter and tip at crazy angles. Broken branches spike from every limb. Some trees are snapped in half. Others are so tangled in their own shredded branches that they look, from afar, like giant birds’ nests, clumped and matted.

An ice storm recently crashed through here, the worst anyone in these parts can remember. It ravaged the cemetery grove known as Memory Lane--and much beyond. The storm tore up trees all across northwest Oklahoma and on through Kansas. The ice wrapped each limb in a glittering death grip, inches thick. Even the most massive branches cracked under the weight. Even the most hearty trunks bent double.

In many towns, this one among them, the parks and cemeteries and courthouse squares will never look the same. Cedars and elms, pecans and hackberries, oaks and pines and persimmon trees are smashed. Cottonwoods that shaded a century of picnic suppers have toppled.

The loss cuts deep. For here on the wide-open plains of America’s heartland, trees mean more than shade and grace.

They are history. They are identity.

“We value our trees,” 84-year-old Maxine Cleaver explained. “Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Because on the prairie, for people to have these trees was wonderful.”

The first photographs of western Oklahoma show unrelenting desolation--flat prairie punching ever forward to a horizon ever out of reach. The pioneers who lined up in Kingfisher at high noon on April 22, 1889 had a clear shot to forever when a representative of the U.S. government officially opened the plain to white settlers. In wagons, on horseback and on foot, they raced through the empty prairie to stake claim to 160-acre tracts.

Once they had established shelter (and saloons and gambling houses), one of their first priorities was planting trees.

They dug up the elms that grew along creek beds and moved them to their yards and public squares--to any place where they wanted a bit of shade, a reminder of the stately streets back East, a shelter from the wicked prairie winds.

The land here is not made for trees. The soil is sandy, the summers are scorching. The wind can be merciless. But the pioneers nurtured those elms until they took.

Years later, in the grip of the Dust Bowl, their grandchildren would do the same. A decade of drought and wind had scoured the plains of green. So President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a belt of trees planted from Texas north to Canada.

The initiative transformed the Great Plains. From 1935 to 1942, at least 30 million trees were planted--forming a giant windbreak that protected crops from erosion. Old-timers here still remember fetching water in tin buckets to douse each precious root. Many of those Dust Bowl trees still were blocking the wind when the ice storm struck.

Now? “Oh, gosh,” said Steve Loftis, the emergency management director for this town of 5,000. “Every street in town--every street in every town in northwest Oklahoma--has damage to its trees.”

“It makes me sick,” said Fred Beers, who lives northeast of here in Perry.

At 77, Beers is the unofficial historian of Perry, another town of 5,000. He’s fond of telling how one Mr. Little, irate over the indignity of having a buffalo wallow in town, planted hundreds of elms in the 1890s to transform a ragged frontier settlement into a proper home. Most of those original trees were long gone before the storm. Dozens of majestic elms replaced them, framing the old buffalo wallow--now a courthouse square.

“The trees made a graceful green oasis in the middle of the town,” Beers said. “Now it looks like a war zone.”

The storm that caused so much damage seemed deceptively mild at first. There was no wind, no hail, not even bitter cold. There was just freezing rain. But it lasted for nearly three days--from Jan. 30 through Feb. 1--glazing every limb and line with ice. Elms 40 and 50 feet tall bent under the weight. Power wires dragged the ground.

More rain fell. More ice collected. And with thunderous cracks, things began to topple.

In Kingfisher County alone, nearly 6,000 power poles were toppled; in one 22-mile stretch, not a single pole was left standing, Loftis said. Even though crews have been called in from as far as Florida, the power company has warned some rural residents that they might not get electricity back until Easter.

No one has even tried to count how many trees were destroyed across the Plains, or in Kingfisher alone. They just know it’s devastating, said Kurt Atkinson of the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture.

In one yard here, a trunk easily 12 feet in circumference fell over, tearing up the driveway. In another, a pecan tree so enormous it produced 300 pounds of nuts a year has been stripped of nearly all its branches.

The noise of tumbling limbs echoed across Kingfisher--across the region--for two days.

“I was in the house just a-ducking and a-dodging. All that crashing made the whole house shake,” Kingfisher resident Betty Tisdale recalled. “I kept thinking: ‘There goes another one. And another one.’ ”

When she emerged to check the damage, she had lost 19 trees. Her yard now looks like it’s ready for a competition in chain saw art. The squirrels are so bewildered, Tisdale throws them pecans out of pity.

Arborists are warning property owners not to rush to chop; even if just 30% of a tree’s branches are intact, it has a shot at surviving. But the older trees likely will die. And experts are urging removal of specimens that are not well suited to Oklahoma’s climate, such as Bradford pears and Siberian elms.

Even those trees that make it will look mighty ragged this summer--and for several summers to come.

Down at Memory Lane, planted in the 1950s along the road leading to the cemetery to pay homage to World War II veterans, virtually every tree lost its crown. Limbs 14 feet long litter the grass. Raw branches, stripped of bark, poke up from trunks helter-skelter. The mile-long strip of trees looks downright spooky.

“It’s quite a shock to see what we’ve got left,” said Eldon Trindle, 80, who helps maintain the grove. “You just don’t have much of a fight against Mother Nature when she’s going that way.”

Keith Boevers, an agricultural advisor with Oklahoma State University, can only agree.

“It’s sickening. One weather event ruins all the time and effort that’s been invested in these trees since the land run of 1889,” he said. Then he straightened. “You just have to step back, regroup and replant,” he said.