Tornado Damage at Fresh Air Park in Neenah
A couple hours after the tornado went through and things had settled down, I drove over to Fresh Air Park to see how the lake looked. I have been going to that park my whole life.
If you are not from Neenah, Fresh Air Park sits on the west shore of Lake Winnebago, over on Maple Lane. It started as a Fresh Air Camp more than a hundred years ago, run by the Neenah School District, back when the thinking was that lake air and open space were good for kids. It did not officially become a city park until 1947. There is a long beach, a boat ramp, and a stand of big old shade trees, and on a normal summer evening it is about the most peaceful place in town.
Monday evening it was not peaceful. The tornado had gone out over Lake Winnebago as it fell apart, and the park sits right there on the edge of the water. I do not know whether the edge of the tornado clipped it or it was straight-line wind off the same storm. A tornado twists, and straight-line wind pushes everything one direction, and I am not going to pretend I can tell you which one did this. All I know is what it left behind.
And the trees are what got me. These are not saplings. Some of the big ones had been snapped clean off partway up, leaving tall splintered spikes of bare wood standing where a full crown used to be. Others were split wide open, the trunk peeled into long pale shards, green leaves still hanging on branches that were suddenly lying on the ground. You do not think of a tree that size as something that can just break. Standing under one with my hand up next to the splinters for scale, it did not look broken so much as exploded.
I took a short video walking through, so you can see that it is not one tree. It is a lot of them, all through the picnic area and down toward the water.
Trees grow back, or we plant new ones. The park is going to look different for a long time, and the shade those old trees threw is gone for a generation. But the lake is still there, the beach is still there, and a park that has stood on this shore for more than a hundred years has seen rough weather before. It will again.
