After ice storm, town reaches out, up

When the snow melted and spring arrived, the ravaged trees presented a costly and massive nuisance of tangled, mangled branches and stumps that nearly everyone in this quiet town some 30 miles west of Boston had to clean up.

Now, say a Harvard musician and his three bandmates, it's time to give the trees a hug. That's right: Stop thinking of trees as a hassle and embrace them as symbols of growth, rebirth, harmony, and one of the main reasons you move to a foliage-friendly place like Harvard.

To help facilitate that mood, the band, The Grin Whistle, is hosting the 500 Tree Festival, a free concert on the town common tomorrow. In addition to performing upbeat bluegrass, the band will be giving away an evergreen seedling to the first 500 homeowners to plant in their yards.

"We had all this negativity associated with trees, because of the ice storm," said Mark Renczkowski, who plays bass and mandolin in the band. "Then you had to dig out your yard. I want people to be able to revive their positive ideas about trees."

The ice storm that tore through New England and upstate New York on Dec. 11 left hundreds of thousands of people without power for many days and wrought havoc on residences, businesses, and transportation. People lived in crowded shelters for unbearable stretches; in Harvard, residents hunkered down in the cafeteria at The Bromfield School.

Renczkowski recalled driving home from work that night and seeing a town that "looked like a tornado had ripped through it." When he approached a firefighter trying to clear the road of trees, he stopped and stepped out of his car, and seconds later a tree fell on it. When he finally reached home, he and his fiancee, Alexis Legidakes, spent a sleepless night listening to the trees crash.

"You could hear the crack-crack-crack BANG, as the branches came down," Legidakes recalled.

It is an experience everyone here remembers vividly. "It was like a war zone," said Gail Conlin, whose family owns Westward Orchards in Harvard. "It was like the report of cannons."

Though not as harsh as the storm and the immediate hardships it brought, the cleanup presented an arduous and expensive effort. As with other hard-hit towns in the region, Harvard received funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Richard C. Nota, the town's public works director, said the money was being used to help pay for a contractor to remove logs, branches, and brush residents leave on the curb in front of their houses. (The contractor then grinds it all into wood chips, which are shipped to Maine for use in a power plant.)

But residents have been responsible for repairing damage to their property, clearing their fallen trees, and cutting away large limbs hanging precariously over their yards. They have had to pay contractors for jobs that required heavy equipment and cherry pickers, work that can cost several thousand dollars.

"Most of the people in town live on very heavily wooded land, and I think the damage to their property was overwhelming," said Mark Mandozzi, a member of the Harvard Parks and Recreation Commission, which spent $6,000 trimming the trees on the common to make it safe to stand under them. "Most people don't set aside thousands of dollars for that kind of thing."

Grin Whistle is paying for the trees it plans to give away with proceeds from its gigs, Renczkowski said before the group ran through a practice set of its upbeat original tunes in his third-floor apartment. The band will get a hand from Adam Horowitz, owner of Harvard General Store, who is planning to store the seedlings in his cellar until tomorrow's festival.

"It's so relevant to the town and a sense of rebuilding after the ice storm," Horowitz said. "Every free moment that they've had, people have had to clean up. It's been a hard winter."

No one suggested that tomorrow's event is related to the death in March of Jessica Peterson, a ninth-grader at The Bromfield School in Harvard. The girl was fatally injured, and her mother, Betsy, seriously hurt when a tree supporting the hammock they were lying in toppled onto them. Police said that the tree had rotted from the inside and that its fall did not appear to be related to the ice storm.

To honor Jessica, her fellow students planted a tree on a slope behind the school building.

David Filipov can be reached at filipov@globe.com.