"It rains, and there are pelicans."

Photos and quote by Jessica, by way of a one-sentence description of what she misses most about Louisiana when we're back home in Greater Louisiana. 

The gales of November remembered

On this date in 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald was lost with all hands on Lake Superior.

Your local radio station will likely play this today, but just in case...

Lyrics and music by Gordon Lightfoot, who rightly considers this his best work; electric and pedal steel guitars by Pee Wee Charles and Terry  Clements.

Not singing, just hot

Grey catbird at Long Pine Creek. Temperatures in northern Nebraska that week were comparable to Tucson, and I think a degree or two higher. Plus humidity.

Small craft warning

She does this sometimes: if she doesn't like the weather in Lincoln, she'll start checking some of our other "hometowns".

J: "Wow, Annapolis has a small craft warning in effect."

M: "That'll be down to the wind."

J: "I suppose so."

M: "Blows away your beads, your yarn, your popsicle sticks and suchlike."

J [after brief pause]: "I don't like you."

"No Birds Today"

A polar vortex has held us in the grips of near-zero weather for a week now: a few degrees above, a few degrees below, but decidedly frigid. As I write this, it's sixteen below outside and it's likely our pipes are frozen, which I'm not yet ready to deal with...and I can't escape this song.

 

"No Birds Today" has always transported me to the more desolate parts of eastern Montana or the Dakotas—or, since the Junkies are a Canadian band, perhaps Alberta or Saskatchewan—on the kind of overcast day that makes it seem winter will never let go. Not a glorious sunlit winter day, but foreboding, gloomy, and bleak, when the life on the prairies is hidden away. When the beauty has to be looked for. But it's out there.

St. Tammany skies

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

—Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Montana claims the moniker Big Sky Country, and Nebraska's sky has long inspired its writers, but Louisiana yields nothing to either. Scenes from one day in St. Tammany Parish: 

By mid-morning, the sky was full of cumulus fractus clouds, what I call a "kite sky". Can you guess why?

The pond at Fontainebleu was like a mirror, if alligators lived in mirrors.

Afternoon skies over Lake Pontchartrain. Jessa's photos look like travel posters for Paradise. (Actually, I think I might have taken one of these...)

More clouds over Pontchartrain, framed by cypress trees hung in Spanish moss.

Sunset (and moonrise) found us in one of the marshes, and we couldn't have wanted a better vantage point. Farewell from Louisiana...

Scenes from a blowout

On our way back from Valentine to Lincoln, Jessa's Outback blew a tyre on the eastern edge of the Sandhills, about 4 miles north of Bartlett, Nebraska, population 120 or so. Roughly the middle of nowhere. From a practical point of view, not an ideal place to have a breakdown.

On the other hand, if you're going to have a breakdown, you couldn't ask for a lovelier spot: a nice bit of grassland with a couple of photogenic trees. And Nebraska does good sunsets, so we were actually grateful to have an excuse to sit while waiting for the wrecker out of Grand Island, some 70 miles away.

Photos by Jessica Farrell-Churchill for the Nebraska Sandhills Department of Sunsets.

Steep

The Cinque Terre is a steep, rugged landscape, where the Ligurian Appenines meet the Ligurian Sea. The average grade, I'm told, is at least 30 degrees, and landslides periodically take out the trails connecting the villages, as well as some of the dry stone terraces that make agriculture possible. The national park (Parco Nazionale delle Cinque Terre) and the municipalities have built fences and wire netting in places to prevent damage from landslides, but such efforts can only accomplish so much. Nature carries a heavy stick, and always bats last.

[Fence netting on a hillside overlooking the harbour that marks the western end of Monterosso al Mare.]

[Stone terracing, abandoned but still standing.]

Four of the five villages that make up the Cinque Terre—Corniglia, which sits high above the sea, is the exception—are situated in ravines where streams come out of the hills above to the sea. Three of the villages, in fact, take their names directly or indirectly from their streams: Riomaggiore is "major river"; Manarola in the local dialect means "big wheel", in reference to the waterwheel that powered the local olive-oil press; and Vernazza is "little Venice", so called for the bridges that used to cross the stream as it ran through town.

"Used to" being the operative term. The streams that birthed the villages have long since been paved over and built on, forced underground for their final stretches, though their upper reaches can still be seen at the top of the towns.

[Streambed entering Monterosso: dry in early August, and apparently for some time before. The outlet can be seen in yesterday's photo of Monterosso's old quarter, near the railway bridge, just left of centre.]

[Domestic ducks on the creek in upper Vernazza.]

Nature took her revenge for the paving over of the streams on 25 October 2011, just 12 years after the establishment of the national park. Heavy rains moved slowly through the area, and flash floods came barreling down the narrow ravines in both Vernazza and Monterosso. Three lives were lost in Vernazza, one in Monterosso, and many others disrupted. Vernazza was essentially closed for over a year as residents and volunteers dug out homes and businesses from under metres of mud and debris.

Though the flood is not specifically mentioned, the resilience of the residents is nicely captured in the poem on this re-purposed amphora in old Monterosso, backed by more anti-landslide netting:

The man of the Cinque Terre
On peak and wave
Scorched by sun
Burned by salt
They face the rock
Like the northwest wind.

Cold

The view from the living-room windows; photos by yours truly.

Symphony

The last day of my hawking season was such a bust that I won't discuss it further, but the one before that...

We went to Cottontail Lake, just Stekoa, the dogs, and me. Lake still frozen, but starting to break up. Place utterly deserted except for ourselves, and the brief visit of a game warden. We started several of the namesake critters; Stekoa put in a couple of nice wingovers, finally caught one in a fast tailchase. All to the accompaniment of The Sound.

It was present from the moment we exited the car, and continued intermittently throughout the afternoon, but periodically changing in character. At times it sounded like a living thing: a dove, a great horned owl (though we later did hear a pair of the real thing duetting), a humpback whale. At other moments it partook of inanimate objects: a piece of sheet metal, held by the edges and bounced; a breath of wind across the top of an empty Coke bottle. Full of harmonics, it emanated from seemingly nowhere and everywhere at once.

It would be tempting to describe the sound as otherworldly, but it was very much of this world, arguably more than any other sound out there—the crunch of gravel under the warden's tyres, the ticking of his engine, the swish of my beating stick through grass, the click of the dogs' tags, the jangling of Stekoa's bells, even the distress cry of the captured rabbit—for while all of us who move on the earth make sound, this came from the earth itself.

It was the sound of the breakup, the tympanic groaning and rumbling of great slabs of ice flexing and tearing and cracking and rubbing one against the other. The song of winter yielding to spring.

[Photos by kind permission of Pat Stull, there a couple of days later.]