Carolina Alcalde was almost home that night.
Five blocks away, thawed in her refrigerator, was a serving of her mother’s Peruvian specialty, carapulcra, which she planned to have for dinner.
She had just had a massage in Crystal City and a peaceful ride back to Washington, and as she sat on her red motorcycle at an intersection waiting for the light to change, she anticipated a quiet night at home in Adams Morgan.
But 50 yards north on 15th Street NW, two accidents of nature were about to converge at the instant of her passing and alter her life forever.
One was a ferocious wave of thunderstorms that had been roaring in from the Midwest all day and now was bearing down on Washington with hurricane-force winds.
The other, perched on the eastern edge of Meridian Hill Park, was a tall evergreen tree, stately to the eye but with a partially rotted trunk.
As Alcalde, 37, sat at the corner of 15th Street and New Hampshire Avenue, the stillness of the hot evening had ended. Wind began to buffet her 360-pound motorcycle. She checked the chin strap on her helmet and adjusted her goggles.
Then the traffic light changed, and she started up the hill. It was about 10:45 p.m. on June 29.
Alcalde doesn’t remember what happened next.
She doesn’t remember the loud crack as the wind snapped the tree and drove it down on her like a hammer, breaking her back, severing her spinal cord and paralyzing her from the chest down.
She doesn’t remember the sudden deluge of rain, or the frantic passersby who first spotted the headlight of her fallen motorcycle through the darkness and debris.
She doesn’t remember the river of water cascading down the street as they tried to drag the tree off her, yelling “One, two, three, pull!”
And she has no recollection of the two D.C. fire department medics who carried her through the storm to their ambulance and found, to their dismay, that she couldn’t wiggle her toes.
Alcalde’s memory resumes an hour or so later in the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital, where she began to hear voices asking if she knew what had happened and if she had an emergency contact they should call.
‘I’m going to walk’
Alcalde, an administrator in the Bethesda office of the business consulting firm CBIZ, was one of several people in the area struck by falling trees or branches during the derecho storm of June 29.
At least four were killed, and Alcalde herself nearly perished.
Had she been a split second earlier, she likely would have gone on with her life, motored up the hill, around to her studio apartment and her dinner.
But fate willed otherwise.
As tens of thousands of people struggled with the chaos of lost power, hot weather and downed trees in the weeks after the storm, her tragedy played out quietly in hospital rooms, away from the headlines.
Attended by her devoted parents and a legion of friends, she is now recovering in a local rehabilitation center after three weeks in the hospital and a five-hour operation to insert metal rods along her shattered spine.
Alcalde faces months of physical therapy and will likely never walk again on her own.
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