The Neighbor with the Chainsaw

Cedar Valley News
June 17, 2026
The Neighbor with the Chainsaw
By Lars Olson

The morning after the storm, my lot was full before I unlocked the door. By the time I flipped the sign, a dozen men were waiting on the walk, and I knew what nearly every one of them had come for.

Chainsaw chains. Bar oil. Gas cans, the red plastic kind, two gallons and five. Tarps, blue, by the dozen. Work gloves. Extension cords, the heavy outdoor kind, fifty feet and a hundred. Ratchet straps. Batteries. A man needs no list for a morning like this. The storm writes the list, and the whole town comes in carrying the same one.

The weather service called it a derecho. I had to look up how to say it. The wind came across the country near ninety miles an hour last week and knocked the power out for more than half a million homes, ours among them. By the time the rain stopped, there were trees down on roofs and lines down across roads, and a quiet in the dark, you do not forget.

You saw the storm on the news. You saw the satellite picture, the red and purple blob sliding across the map. You saw the number of homes without power and the airport delays in the city. The news is good at the night of the storm.

The news is not there for the morning after. It does not keep a camera at my counter, where the real story gets told, one customer at a time, for the next three weeks.

Here is what the news missed. The first man through my door did not buy a chainsaw chain for his own tree. He bought it for the widow two houses down, whose maple came through her porch roof in the night. The second man bought a second gas can, because his generator was already running a line across the fence to the house next door, where a fellow keeps his insulin in the refrigerator. A woman bought every tarp I could put in her cart and would not say whose roofs they were for.

This is the part you only see from behind a counter. A storm does not only knock things down. It shows you, in one morning, who in a town knows how to do a thing, and who will do it for somebody else.

I have run this store for forty years. I have opened the morning after more storms than I can count, and it is always the same, and it always surprises me. I should be used to it by now. I am not. The town I serve, the one I worry has forgotten how to fix anything, turns out to be full of people who own a chainsaw and know how to use it and will spend a whole Saturday on a tree which is not theirs.

It is the emergency system nobody puts on a map. Not the one with the sirens. The one with the neighbor with the chainsaw, the neighbor with the generator, and the willingness to walk it down the block.

Half the men in my line had never run a chainsaw for anything but firewood. By noon, they had the hang of it, because somebody had to, and the man next to them already knew how. A skill spreads fast in a town the morning it is finally needed.

The county will send crews. The power company will send crews. They will get to the big lines first, as they should, and the small streets will wait. In the waiting is where a town finds out what it is made of. We are made, it turns out, of one another.

So here is the practical part, because I am a practical man. Buy the chainsaw before the storm, not the morning after, when I am out of chains. Keep a gas can full in the garage. Learn to start the generator on a calm day, not by flashlight in the rain. Know which neighbor keeps medicine cold, and which one lives alone.

The wind will come again. It always does. Be the kind of house your street can count on when it does.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us who showed up for you after the storm, or whose tree you cut yourself. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the June 2026 derecho described in this editorial, and the power outages it caused across the Midwest, are real.

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