Bryce Maritano recalls hearing a loud snap while he was in his central Dunsmuir cabin the evening of Aug. 31. It was quickly followed by two more snaps.
By the time he had gotten out of bed to investigate, a final and thunderous boom sounded on the roof of the cabin.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” the easy-going Maritano said by phone Monday. “The wind was blowing, the lights flickered, I walked across the cabin to see what was happening. The first snap was a small cedar tree breaking in two, the second snap was a larger cedar. Then a large limb snapped, and then the oak tree came down on the cabin with an incredible boom. It hit directly above my head. Fortunately, the cabin held up. According to a guy from the “A Cut Above Tree Service,” the tree weighed 9,000 pounds.”
The weight of the falling tree shook the cabin and knocked a framed picture off the wall, which struck Maritano in the toe. Other than that, Maritano – creator of Dunsmuir Media, a company and website which aims to promote the town – sustained no injuries. The cabin, however, suffered substantial damage which will take months to repair.
Maritano said a wall was pushed off its track and the ridge beam was broken, as well as a number of joists. The repair will require lifting the roof off the cabin, during which time Maritano will have to find other accommodations, a situation he is not happy about.
“It’s a great cabin. Everybody agreed that it’s amazing that the cabin held up,” he said. “The owner says that it dates at least to [the early 1970s]. But you take one look at it and you know that it is much older than that. It could even date to as early as 1910. It’s pre-craftsman, shotgun shack architecture.”
When the oak tree first hit at roughly 9:30 p.m., Maritano said he found himself confused and disoriented. As he went outside to survey the damage, neighbors began to gather to look at the fallen tree with him. By the next afternoon, the A Cut Above Tree Service crew had started sawing up the tree, a job that went until until neighbors’ complaints about noise led the Sheriff’s Department to request a work stoppage at 12:30 a.m. By early Tuesday morning, the tree had been cut away from the cabin.
While conceding that it may have been foolhardy, Maritano did not abandon his beloved cabin after the tree fell on it, but instead went about his business as best he could, including sleeping in his bed, albeit with four tons of oak tree hanging above him.
“I began to call it, ‘The Tree of Damocles,’” Maritano explained with a laugh, in reference to a story from ancient Greece about a king who hung a sword above his banquet hall by a single horsetail hair to give his court an idea of the stress he faced as ruler.
Nick Borgatti of A Cut Above Tree Service was part of the crew which sawed the oak off of the cabin. “From what I could tell, it looked like the tree was compromised in its root structure and the wind knocked it down,” Borgatti said. “It didn’t fall from very far from the cabin and didn’t build a lot of momentum.”
In the days since the incident, Maritano has been visited by area residents inquiring after the oak, which is a sought-after, and increasing expensive, firewood.
Maritano said he came to Dunsmuir in February after completing a five year search for a small California community with “...spectacular natural beauty and tourist potential that wasn’t being promoted.” He set up his web-based business in the quaint blue cabin.
“Because Dunsmuir has the freeway and the railroad, tourists can get here easily,” Maritano explained. “But the problem is that people don’t know that [the town] is here. That’s a shame.”
Maritano’s website, www.dunsmuirmedia.com, is in the process of compiling information and postcard pictures of all aspects of the town to help spread information about Dunsmuir’s recreational opportunities over the internet.
Dunsmuir, Calif. —
