Posted on 09/21/2003 10:43:10 PM PDT by anymouse
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
President Bush spends hours each day of his Texas vacation with his trusty chain saw, happily cutting up the cedar trees that he is determined to clear one of these decades from his 1,600-acre ranch.
Clearly, putting in time with the saw is recreation for Mr. Bush, a sweat-through-the-T-shirt kind of guy activity that clears his head and helps him relax. Because when it came to clearing the North Lawn of the White House last week of a big linden tree felled by Hurricane Isabel, Mr. Bush left the chain-sawing to the National Park Service and stayed on higher ground at Camp David.
The linden, it turned out, was the main casualty visited upon the White House by the storm, which like all acts of nature was democratic in its force. Washingtonians spent the weekend clearing downed trees and branches, and so too did the staff of the White House, which at the end of the day is still a home.
"I thought we were lucky we only lost one tree," said Dale Haney, the White House horticulturist, who stepped over the branches in his own suburban Virginia yard to reach the North Lawn by 6:30 a.m. Friday, when he surveyed the damage that had worried him all night.
What Mr. Haney saw relieved him, but the scene was still surprising. The normally pristine North Lawn was strewn with the huge branches of the century-old linden tree, which had split in half. The tree stood not far from the large circular fountain off Pennsylvania Avenue. Mr. Haney, who has been tending the 18 1/2 acres of White House grounds for three decades, said the linden had been supported by cables, and was properly trimmed and healthy.
But the wind nonetheless brought it down — the first time, as far as he knew, that a hurricane had toppled a White House tree.
To Mr. Haney's further relief, the linden was not one of the 48 trees planted by presidents on the White House grounds, like the two Andrew Jackson southern magnolias on the west side of the South Portico or the four saucer magnolias planted by John F. Kennedy in the Rose Garden. (The current Bushes have planted a cut-leaf maple on the South Lawn.)
The White House began preparing for the storm at midweek, when workers took down flags and awnings and cleared drains, like everyone else in town. By Wednesday afternoon, the president and Mrs. Bush were on Marine One to Camp David for the weekend a day earlier than planned, to beat the storm, while two of the planes that serve as Air Force One, a 747 and a 757, were flown to Robins Air Force Base in Georgia for safekeeping.
By Thursday, with the White House rapidly emptying, maintenance workers moved in for last-minute hurricane preparations. "The whole staff was in, so it didn't take long," Mr. Haney said. "Plumbers, electricians, everybody pitched in."
Pots of petunias and coleus from the White House's five patios were taken in, as were the potted myrtle trees. Large hanging baskets of begonias were nestled into flower beds, and outdoor furniture was stashed in the West Garden Room at the end of the Rose Garden colonnade.
At Camp David, Mr. Bush held a news conference on Thursday morning with King Abdullah of Jordan — again, a day earlier than planned.
"I know this was supposed to take place at a different time," the president told reporters, "but we wanted to get this over with so that you didn't have to float down the hill, if you know what I mean."
Hurricane Isabel also allowed Mr. Bush a natural cutoff to all the unpleasant questions about the Middle East and Iraq.
"All right, get going before it starts raining," the president told reporters, ending the news conference after 16 minutes.
At the White House on Thursday evening, with the chief occupants slumbering at Camp David, the hurricane watch was left to the usual security people as well as two Park Service employees who spent the night on cots in a maintenance shed in a far corner of the South Lawn, nervously checking every crash and bump in the dark. The pair armed themselves with chain saws — the White House has two — and remained alert for branches and trees falling on the drives near the White House.
"They were in and out all night long," Mr. Haney said. "I don't know know if they got much sleep."
By Friday morning at Camp David, King Abdullah and his wife, Queen Rania, were preparing to return to Jordan, but there was no news from the White House on how the president had whiled away the stormy night in the Catoctin Mountains with the king. A few trees did fall at Camp David, said a White House spokeswoman, Claire Buchan, "but none of them posed any danger to the president."
Back in Washington, where the storm left millions in the city and surrounding states without power (the lights stayed on at the White House, to no one's surprise) Vice President Dick Cheney spent part of his morning surveying the downed branches on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, where he lives. Or, at least, a man who looked remarkably like Mr. Cheney, with a black Labrador retriever and what appeared to be grandchildren in tow, could be seen walking near the observatory's outer fence if you happened to be cruising down Massachusetts Avenue around 11 a.m.
No word on whether the vice president took up a chain saw.
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