The Natural Enquirer: Tornado Mysteriously Produces Salad Bowls !

August, 2011 - - Western Massachusetts -

There are more than enough sad tales to be told about the ravages of the tornado(s) that bore down on western Mass on June 1, 2011. But now, it seems there's something really odd that happened in the affected, enchanted  forests...

While hiking -  er, clambering - through a thick, nearly impenetrable jungle of twisted tree trunks and amputated arboreal appendages, we began to find peculiar chunks of wood that had obviously been ejected from the fractured tree trunks during the high-wind assault. They appear to be nearly perfect, nested sets of what could be described as "salad bowls".

Amazing as it seems, the tornado winds apparently have the ability, probably only in rare conditions, to excavate layers of wood that separate into these nested sets, with smaller bowls fitting neatly inside larger ones.

So far, we've found several of these sets in the forest, scattered about in the tornado's swath, and all have been of Maple. The sets contain three or four bowls, nicely matched because they are all from the same hunk of wood. No one has yet offered a satisfactory explanation of how these oddities were created. If you have any theories about this, please post them, we'd love to hear plausible explanations.

At any rate, unlike most other after-effects, they're a welcomed memento of this powerful weather phenomenon, the tornado of June 1, 2011. And we plan to search the local forests for more! Maybe we'll see you out there.