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White Hurricane

the Great Lakes in winter

“White Hurricane” by Lou Blouin of FoundMichigan.org

An excellent story of an epic storm that struck the Great Lakes 100 years ago today.

Modern weather forecasting was in its infancy. At the time, basic weather observations were gathered by hand by people scattered across the country, like human instruments, then wired back to the Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, where it was all compiled, analyzed for patterns and clues, regurgitated, codified, and wired back. These “forecasts” were a half day or more out of date by the time they arrived. Fast changing conditions simply charged through the open cracks. The warnings of a major storm sometimes arrived after the storm did.

That’s what happened in 1913. A fierce arctic gale out of Canada crashed into a warm gulf front pouring over the Appalachians. The collision occurred over the Great Lakes, and caught the whole region by surprise, exploding into a storm never seen before. Two feet of snow fell overnight. Winds went from balmy to hurricane force within the span of a half hour, whipping up waves 35 feet high. Ships and sailors on the notoriously dangerous waters were caught vulnerable and woefully unprepared for what lay in store.

By the time it was done, 12 major ships and over 250 men were lost in this single storm – more than in all the seasons of the decade before combined. Bodies of sailors washed up on the shores for days, as did parts of their ships, often scribbled with their forlorn farewells to loved ones.

A great story well told, well worth a read.

 

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MASCF 2013 ~ How to Shuck an Oyster

 

Video from the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival
Clips from Friday and Saturday.

Back when the Depression hit (the one in the ’30s) my grandfather, my dad’s dad, hitched a mule and plow to a fence post in a field in Arkansas. He walked into the road, thumbed a ride with a trucker, and left home and never went back. According to his brothers, this made his father – who was known across three counties for epic rages – mad as hell.

Besides lying about his age to get into the army, among other things, he believed he could scrape together a living if he could play music. He taught himself to play fiddle and started a band. They travelled all over the country playing dance halls and pasture parties full of Oakies and other desperate displaced persons. When he noticed saxophone players were getting better-paying gigs, he taught himself sax and learned to swing. There was a faded black and white photo of him on the wall in the house, wearing a suit and a skinny tie on some stage in a barn in the mid-west, a framed playbill next to it.

By the time I was 12, he’d forgotten how to play most of the songs from those years, and most of the guys who knew them had died.That didn’t stop him and some local buddies from trying, though, after a they’d had a few beers. Eventually, there were only about four songs they could play drunk with a fiddle, a guitar, and a gut bucket. Sitting up with them late at night I learned them all.

“Goodnight Irene” was one of them.

 

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Boats and Bikes ~ Boats and Boatbuilding at the Adirondack Museum

 Guideboat under construction

direct video link 

 

 

 

One day it rained. Almost all the day it rained. We could have stayed inside by a window and read, but instead went to the Adirondack Museum on Blue Mountain Lake; because a) it’s a really great museum with lots of very cool stuff to see, and b) I remembered they have a terrific collection of boats on exhibit. Continue reading “Boats and Bikes ~ Boats and Boatbuilding at the Adirondack Museum”

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Boats and Bikes ~ Saranac

Saranac & Saranac on a Saranac

 

Saranac, New York
Saranac River
Town of Saranac
Town of Saranac Lake
Saranac Chain of Lakes
Upper Saranac Lake
Middle Saranac Lake
Lower Saranac Lake
Six Different Saranac Beers

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Boats and Bikes ~ Bixi Montreal

pianos and bikes in the park 

 

Montreal was founded hundreds of years before the automobile, and never really got on board with the whole idea. Many streets in the old quarter are still cobblestone and narrow, more suited to carriages and peddler carts. That’s part of the appeal. And like many old cities, they’ve only grudgingly made concessions to cars. Parking is a hassle. Within 8 hours of arriving, we got our first parking ticket. That’s what the nice lady who let us in was trying to say: We had to move the car by morning for the street cleaners, and shuffle from spot to spot like a shell game every few days, or we’d start paying fines. Once we found a safe and free place to leave the car, we did, and didn’t fool with it again for the remaining three days in the city. And, fortunately, didn’t need to. Bicycles were a much better way to get around. Waaaay better.

 

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Boats and Bikes ~ Montreal, Quebec

Montreal Cathedral by night

 

Getting into Canada was a real a pain. The drive from Burlington would normally take about 2 hours door to door. But there was some sort of security alert in effect, coupled with a whole bunch of Canadians returning from some weekend event in the States. It took four+ hours, two of that to go one mile at the border. We almost went through a back country crossing, one we saw at the north end of Lake Champlain, but didn’t have a map or GPS for the country roads beyond. Should have. Even lost and wandering in the woods would have been a faster than the highway.

 

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Boats and Bikes ~ Island Line Trail

an elegant classic sloop shoots “The Cut”  in the video

 direct video link

 

Back when Burlington began reclaiming the waterfront, one of the first things they did was reacquire the old railroad bed running along the shore, a strip of land that effectively put the lake behind a fence. Once in public hands again, not only was access restored to most of the shore, but the graded bed provided a perfect foundation for a walking and biking trail. That’s how the Island Line Trail was born, and it now runs roughly 12 miles north out of Burlington.

 

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