Breaking branches and bones

Two-hundred-six.

That’s how many bones there are in the adult human body. That leaves me with 204 I have yet to break.

Like most everyone else in town, last week’s climatological fun and games left me with no power, no warm water and – by far the most serious crisis – no Wi-Fi. I lasted a day before I made arrangements to stay elsewhere for a while. I do not come from hardy pioneer stock.

When the twister had passed and Auntie Em again poked her head up from the root cellar, I returned home. But instead of finding the real-life counterparts of the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow, I found trees. Lots and lots of trees, all scattered across the roof of my little lake house.

On the bright side, my furnace and water heater were back in business. The pump that carries water away from the house (there’s a name for the thing, but I don’t know what it is) was kaput. Fortunately, workers from Greenville’s excellent Water Department not only know what that pump is called, but they showed up an hour or so after I reported the problem. They fixed it.

For all intents and purposes, I had rejoined civilization. I tried the internet and it was still there, exactly as I remembered it from four days earlier. My streaming TV services were intact, though the programming had not improved. Still no free “X-files” reruns.

Despite the limited television offerings, I was glad to have things back to normal.

I charged my Kindles, my phone, my watch, my iPad, my laptop; all the things which, before the power outage, I had taken for granted. I threw out the food that might have gone bad from spending four days in a room temperature refrigerator and replaced it with new food from the grocery.

I opened a bottle of pinot noir, put on fuzzy pants and prepared to settle in for the night, comfortable and secure in my little lakeside paradise. The wind outside howled, but I was cozy and warm.

I tried to ignore the sounds coming from the roof, the scraping and rumbling of branches scudding against tiles and vinyl siding. I tried to relax.

But as I sat there on the sofa, trying to get into a book my daughter recommended, I started thinking about those branches. Some of them were big, maybe eight inches around, 10 to 15-feet long.

I lack any sort of forestry experience, but my guess was some of the branches were pretty darn heavy. And like I said, there were a lot of them up there.

Snow was falling, steadily adding to the weight. The creaking sounds I heard, as of ceiling joists slowly buckling beneath great pressure, may have been only my imagination. Then again, maybe not.

I did not rest easy that first night back, though the pinot helped.

The next day I decided to be proactive, something I rarely do unless there’s a good chance 15,000 pounds of lumber are going to fall through the roof and kill me in my sleep.

I got up early (which, in these post-retirement days means noon), bundled up in a half-dozen layers of winter-resistant fabric, and headed out back armed with a shovel, a small electric chainsaw and a ladder. Now, anyone who has read this column before is already aware those tools are, for me, the trifecta of death. In a perfect world, it would be against the law for me to own any tool more dangerous than a corkscrew.

I placed the ladder against the side of the house, plugged in the chainsaw, secured the small snow shovel to my belt with a carabiner – so I’d only have to make one trip up the ladder – and proceeded to climb.

One rung, two rungs … there was no third rung. None that my foot made contact with, at any rate. The snapping sound I heard when I hit the ground was all too familiar. My right leg this time.

A 200-foot, hilly crawl through drifting snow got me to my car, which got me to the Spectrum emergency room, which got me to a doctor, who fixed my leg (or at least set it on the path to healing).

Linda, one of my neighbors from the other side of the lake, put me in touch with a guy who knows how to operate ladders, shovels and chainsaws without breaking any bones. The branches will soon be gone. And in four-to-five weeks, my leg will again be fully functional.

While I wait, I’ll use the internet to discover new and exciting bits of knowledge. Like how many bones there are in the adult human body.