flooding

Balmy Then Frigid – ND #59

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Tohickon overtopping her banks – Photo: L. Weikel

Balmy Then Frigid

Short one this evening. I have a vague headache and I wonder if it’s related to the indecisive nature of the temperature outside over the past few days. First balmy, then frigid; pouring rain, massive puddles, swollen creeks and rivers. Tonight, utter clarity revealing the cosmos causes another plunge of temps.

I don’t think I’ve heard one car drive past our house tonight. People must be heeding the entreaties to stay home. It’s refreshing. People are always out tooling around when it’s snowing. But maybe everyone just decided that it’s Friday and, what the heck, they might as well just hunker down where they are.

Nothing’s worse than driving and suddenly realizing you’re on a sheet of ice. As soon as you feel that vague but unmistakable sense that there’s suddenly no traction between your vehicle’s tires and the surface of the road, a pit of terror strikes. It’s sort of like the plunge your stomach takes when you breach the top of a roller coaster.

It’s the sudden and unmistakable sense that, in that moment, you have no control over anything.

Swollen Tohickon – Photo: L. Weikel

Swollen Tohickon

I made a pit stop to my beloved Tohickon Creek earlier this afternoon. I haven’t had a chance to sit beside her and just have a conversation with her in a few months. Yes, I visited – briefly – when I walked there a few weeks ago. But the sun was setting and there was a lot of snow and ice around and nowhere for me to just sit and ‘be.’

Communing with the creek wasn’t in the cards today, either. My usual spot was inaccessible. The Tohickon was overflowing her banks and her waters quite literally would’ve poured into my car had I even attempted to park there.

The mighty Lenape Sipu (Delaware River) was equally as swollen with muddy, opaque water coursing downstream. Chunks of logs and spiky broken tree limbs bobbed and swirled in the eddies caused by rocks and other obstacles hidden from view.

But even more troubling, knowing the temperatures were soon to plummet, were the sheets of water streaming across most of the roadways. So much water with nowhere to go.

Nights like tonight are the stuff of comforters and candlelight and gratitude for a warm home and a good book.

(T+59)

Filled to the Brim – Day 1026

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Aqueduct in Point Pleasant, PA 2 Sept 2021 – Photo: L. Weikel

Filled to the Brim

No matter where you look, it seems we’re filled to the brim. Our creeks and rivers are overflowing with water. Our forests are filled with the hot fury of fire. Our hearts are filled with shock, rage, fear, and hopefully, equal or greater measures of love, compassion, and hope.

I don’t have a lot to say tonight.

I’m always amazed at the brilliance of the blue skies the morning after a storm of great fury, be it a blizzard or a hurricane. Your average, run-of-the-mill snowstorm or rain event can come and go and the next day the skies may retain their cranky gray visage. But not following a storm of great consequence.

Just like a mother who has bitten her tongue one too many times, Mother Nature occasionally unleashes the accumulation of atmospheric energy and clears the decks. She withholds nothing. She lets us have it. And then, forgiving and forward-looking, she lets it all go and moves on. The sparkling clarity left behind is her gift to us.

A reminder that no matter how dark and furious things can get, the sun does come out again. The skies do clear. The air once again becomes breathable and invigorating.

Tohickon Creek at Point Pleasant – Photo: L. Weikel

Around Us

I only ventured out a few miles from our home today. So many roads were – and remain – closed. I’ve yet to get a glimpse of the Lenape Sipu (Delaware River). But I did manage to sneak a peak at where my beloved Tohickon Creek flows into the Delaware in Point Pleasant.

It looks like the power of the Tohickon pulled some boards off the aqueduct that crosses over it just before the creek merges with the river. Just standing on the bridge to take the photo, I could feel the power of the churning waters below me.

As can be seen below, water simply cascading down the hill without a discernible path to follow pounded the roadway so relentlessly that it caused it to buckle.

River Road, Point Pleasant, PA – Photo: L. Weikel

Carrying On

It’s shocking to consider that we were only hit with the ‘remnants’ of Hurricane Ida. My mind reels at the plight of those who were scathed by nature’s fury not only here – in devastating loss of life and home – but even more so in Louisiana, Mississippi, and elsewhere down south. I cannot imagine enduring temperatures where the heat index is reaching 107 during the day and yet there remains no running water, no electricity (and therefore no air conditioning), no lights at night, and little hope of anything being restored anytime soon.

How does one carry on in that situation? Blue skies surely can’t be enough. Or maybe they can be. When we’ve lost everything, maybe blue skies – and the intangible hope they reflexively bring us – are precisely what our souls require.

Tangle of wildflowers & white butterflies – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-85)

Take Shelter – Day 1025

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Before the tornado warnings – Photo: L. Weikel

Take Shelter

Well. I’m not sure where to start this evening. At the moment, the small, barely noticeable creek across the road from my house sounds like a roiling cataract. Sirens plaintively called out a couple of times tonight – a worrisome sound any time (especially when one lives out in the country). But they sounded especially lonely and dire as our cell phones simultaneously bleated out tornado warnings – entreating us to take shelter below ground, if possible.

I’m sorry. Where do we live? Last I looked, it was amidst the farms, fields, and woodlands of Pennsylvania. Not Kansas or Oklahoma. Yet here we are. From what I can tell, it sounds like there may have been two or three tornadoes touching down in our area earlier tonight.

Here’s a snippet of an astonishing video of a tornado winding its way up the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River just tonight. Is it because we usually see videos of tornadoes touching down and moving along vast acres of flat land that we have a distorted sense of how fast these beasts actually move? Watching that video feels unnatural.

Quite honestly, it feels like everything – not just the weather – is totally askew and out of balance.

Photo: L. Weikel

Speaking of Catastrophic Events

In addition to my profound concern over everyone who is impacted by the torrential rains, the terrifying and devastating tornadic activity, and the current and impending flooding that will only get worse over the next few days, there’s…Texas.

Honest to goodness, the complete disregard of the Constitutional rights of women in Texas makes me want to throw up. Inelegant, I’m the first to admit. But the unbelievable cruelty of empowering vigilante-citizens to essentially hunt women for a $10,000 bounty is insane. Add to that the American Taliban’s* determination that anyone aiding any woman who may be seeking an abortion beyond six weeks gestation can also be sued?

It is no wonder we needed to withdraw from Afghanistan. Good grief. We have our very own American brand of dehumanizing and debasing women, thank you very much. Perhaps we should mind our own ability to treat women as sovereign citizens with equal rights before we preach it anywhere else.

Not a creek, not a stream – Photo: L. Weikel

Crumbling Foundations

Remember how I’ve commented a number of times in the blogs of 2021 that this year is all about navigating the astrological phenomenon of ‘Saturn squaring Uranus?’ The old paradigms being shattered by sudden blows to their foundations? Unexpected transformations of traditional ways of being and ‘the way things have always been done?’

Well here we are. We are receiving absolute clarity on two major issues facing our country and the world:

Climate change is real.  And oppression and subjugation of women is an agenda paramount to the (not my father’s) Republican party.

The time is now to save ourselves. And it’s stunningly clear (if not a sad commentary on what we all knew if we’ve been paying attention) – we cannot rely on the Supreme Court of the United States to enforce the rights of women.

Think about the ramifications of that statement.

If we don’t take action now to defend what we know is right and true, more than the foundations of our homes will be swept away.

*affiliate link

(T-86)

No Lamb Today – Day 841

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Wild Afternoon Sky – Photo: L. Weikel

No Lamb Today

Without even going outside this morning, I could hear the runoff of melted snow coursing along the side of our road. Water rushed through a tunnel of compacted snow, amplifying the sound of its frenzied quest to join either the Tohickon or the Delaware, whichever was quickest and easiest to access. The sky was gray but the air was mild, content to simply do the job of melting winter’s whites. I truly thought I had this ‘first day’ pegged; but alas, March was no lamb today.

Oh sure, every once in a while the sun tried to push through and shake things up, but it was a heavy lift. The day just felt sort of blah.

Only when I had to run out to the post office in the late afternoon did I start rethinking my assessment. Snarling clouds were building in the west and I sensed a growing energy that felt distinctly leonine. I stopped by the creek to pay my respects and everything just felt dismal and swollen.

Swollen Tohickon – Photo: L. Weikel

 

Overflowing her banks – Photo: L. Weikel

Transformation

An hour later, Karl and I were heading out with Spartacus. The weather transformed before our very eyes. There was the barest hint that change was coming as we rounded the first corner. Those dark billowing layers of slate gray clouds had almost magically given way to a speckled sky of marshmallow puffs.

The longer we walked, the more dramatically everything shifted. Another mile under our belts and overhead the puffs poofed and their background of blue became the main event.

As we crested the final hill, the power behind the shift made itself known. We kept looking behind ourselves, thinking the whooshing sound we heard was an approaching car. But no, it was the wind, and that wind started buffeting us, moving us along, and most definitely ‘blowing the dust off’ our attitudes.

Speckled Sky of Puffs – Photo: L. Weikel

This Evening

As I sit here writing the title of this post, ‘No Lamb Today,’ the catalyzing wind has only become wilder and is making our normally melodious wind chimes clang vociferously. (I should probably bring them in.)  The lights have dimmed at least four times this evening, but we’ve mercifully been spared a complete loss of electricity. So far, anyway. It’s a wonder.

At the moment, it feels like the wind is angry and determined to root out and whisk away anything that isn’t grounded and in it for the long haul. Its roar is unmistakably declaring that March 2021 is coming in like a lion.

May it clear away the Covid! Help us all start fresh. It’s a new month – a month of new growth, of hope, of life returning to the surface of our consciousness. The month that brings us spring.

All in the span of two hours – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-270)

Just Weird – Day 635

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Opposite of Clarity – Photo: L. Weikel

Just Weird

Am I the only one? I’m having a really hard time focusing. The day today felt surreal; I was never really sure what time it was. Perhaps because the skies grew so dark and foreboding so early in the afternoon, everything felt skewed and off. And normally, I love a good thunderstorm. But the one that struck tonight was in keeping with an entire week that was just weird.

I feel restless and unsettled. Karl and I had a misunderstanding almost first thing this morning that left us screaming in each other’s faces. It was shocking. And utterly hilarious (in retrospect). Sort of. But not really. It was just weird.

I can’t even put my finger on the word that would accurately characterize what exactly happened this morning. Argument isn’t the word – there was no issue upon which we were disagreeing. Hence disagreement, too, fails the test. Misunderstanding is probably the closest I’m going to get.

Opposite of Speaking in Tongues

Having been raised Catholic, studying the bible was not a foundational activity in my youth. That said, I am familiar with the concept of ‘speaking in tongues,’ and have always understood it to mean that when a person in biblical times spoke in tongues, no matter what their background, whoever was listening to the speaker heard the message being spoken in the listener’s native language.

Conceptually, that possibility always appealed to me. I could imagine it happening; pretty easily, in fact. Although I had to wonder how anyone would know it was happening. I figured the only way they’d realize it was happening would be by realizing they were unable to communicate with each other.

So I found it puzzling on the one or two occasions I saw what I guess were considered to be people speaking in tongues that no one could understand the gobbledygook that was issuing from their lips.

That’s not my point here, although I’m wondering if anyone else has had a similar antithetical experience.

My point is that Karl’s and my morning today began with a ‘conversation’ in which we were ostensibly speaking to each other but not communicating a damn thing. It was as if we were speaking in anti-tongues. Or talking under water. No matter how hard we tried, the words just weren’t coming out right. Or maybe they weren’t being heard correctly.

The frustration we both felt resulted in us literally screaming in each other’s faces. It was awful and unsettling and…incendiary. It was profoundly uncharacteristic of both our personalities and our relationship.

It was also just plain weird.

Just Fed Up

After each storming off to lick our wounded egos and reflect upon our justified outrage, it took us about half an hour of fits and starts at reconciliation to come to the conclusion that our explosions toward each other stemmed from our mutual frustration over…everything.

Everything ‘out there’ that we have absolutely no control over. It’s almost as if no one speaks the same language anymore. Everyone speaks their own personal dialect and it seems as if there’s no desire or attempt to understand the perspective or feelings of others anymore.

Karl had been trying to tell me where he’d found himself detoured due to flash flooding. I was trying to visualize where he was talking about. Neither one of us were approaching the scenario from a perspective that permitted communication of anything meaningful. Even this attempt to describe the utter banality of our inability to understand each other feels like a failure.

But I’m trying to capture it because somehow that feels like the point. It feels like what I imagine a lot of us are feeling with respect to a whole range of issues from the slightest (like ours) to the most consequential we can imagine.

We’re totally fine. But I have to say: it was just weird.

Flooding – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-476)

Tropical Storm Isaias – Day 632

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Photo: L. Weikel

Wow. Well, I mentioned in last night’s post that here in Pennsylvania we’re not used to tropical storms maintaining their ferocity as they march into our area from the south or tornado warnings beeping out on our phones and warning us to ‘take appropriate cover.’ Enter Tropical Storm Isaias – yet another reason to wonder just what we did to so profoundly piss off 2020.

Who’d have imagined a tornado would touch down at  the hospital in our county seat of Doylestown? The storm ripped off part of the roof of the on-site daycare center, damaged another pavilion, and tossed about and upended six cars in the parking lot. And that’s just one instance among many reports of a devastating number of trees uprooted and creeks and other bodies of water blowing past their flood stages and inundating everything in their path.

And it does sound as if the full moon did indeed exacerbate the impact this storm had when it slammed into the North Carolina coast as a Category 1 hurricane last night. Storm surges have been devastating and well over 3.5 million households are without electricity. It’s all a bit hard to fathom – a tropical storm at the beginning of August.

Stress Eaters

Just after the height of the storm hit, I walked out onto our porch to take some photos of the storm water cascading across our property. As I stood there in the pouring rain, I was joined by Spartacus. Instead of acting fearful of the storm, he quite adorably seemed more concerned than anything else.

Spartacus – Storm Watcher – Photo: L. Weikel

Then I noticed something even odder. There were a bunch of birds at our feeders! That was pretty much the last thing I expected to see in the midst of the storm. Granted, the absolute worst had probably just peaked – but the rain was still pounding down and strong gusts of wind were whipping the willow behind our barn and making the rest of the trees dance very hard to keep up.

Yet there were these birds, crowding several of my feeders. My heart went out to them as I sort of chuckled to myself. I could relate. Clearly they were stress-eating; stuffing in as much as they could while the getting was good. Living for the moment.

Stress eaters – Photo: L. Weikel

Rampaging Tohickon

After the storm passed and bright sunshine made everything look and feel as though it’d just been power-washed, the after-effects were startling. The Tohickon overflowed its banks and was rapaciously engaged in transporting logs and all sorts of other bobbing doo-dads and detritus to the Delaware River.

Many roads were impassable, either as a result of flooded creeks and streams or massive trees giving up the ghost and dragging electrical wires down with them.

The Delaware practically had enough trees floating down it to qualify as a forest itself.

Tohickon Creek – Photo: L. Weikel

It’s Only August

While I’m profoundly grateful we were spared the worst of it, I have to admit, this does give me paust. It’s only August. That seems pretty darn early to me to be dealing with a storm of this magnitude. Given the attitude of 2020 so far, I don’t think I want to challenge worse – that’s for sure.

It’s kind of amazing to contemplate just how devastatingly effective Mother Earth is at putting us in our place. It doesn’t take much. We really are a vulnerable species when you get right down to it, which makes me wonder. Is that why we’re often such bullies when it comes to Nature?

I hope everyone is safe and dry. I’d say I hope you’re warm, too – but if you have no electricity, warm may not exactly be the state you prefer. I hope you’re safe, dry, and comfortable. Take good care of yourselves – and don’t forget to feed your birds.

Casualty of Tropical Storm Isaias – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-479)

One of Those Days – Day 440

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A small portion of the lineup – Photo: L. Weikel

One of Those Days

I knew they’d happen. You knew they’d happen. It was inevitable, really. And today is one of those days.

Perhaps it’s the number? 440? I can’t say it holds any special meaning for me one way or another. But it seems like a nice round number to get stuck on.

Or maybe the pelting sheets of rain that pummeled our area today left me, at least, feeling waterlogged? Yes, maybe all my inspiration got swept up into the streams overflowing their banks and barreling down the roads in muddy rages.

Detours were in place.

It could’ve been snow.

Sheep – Paused

We had to stop the car and turn around. Neither one of us felt the scene could be real. Stealthily maneuvering our Prius so that it was facing the meadow from a little used connector road, we stared at the long line of sheep coming and going – or at least frozen in motion while doing so.

Karl and I looked at the sight before us and felt a sense of unreality around us. There had to be 50 or so sheep in a row appearing to tread out to pasture. About half were headed one way on the muddy path and the other half, headed in, toward the barn, were on a collision course with them.

But the weird thing was that, in fact, none of them were moving at all.

It was as if the ‘pause’ button on the sheeps’ shared consciousness had been pressed and all of their movements ceased, leaving them hanging mid-step.

It was almost as if we accidentally witnessed a behind-the-scenes moment in the shared movie of our life.

(T-671)

Darkness – Day 242

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Winds in Opposition – Photo: L. Weikel

Darkness                              

The weather today felt foreboding. Darkness infiltrated every nook and cranny and, disturbingly, that dramatic lack of light was not at all associated with the end of the day.

I took the photo, above, in a feeble attempt to capture the eerie way the clouds were moving well before today’s storm actually arrived. (Of course, video captured it much more effectively than did the still shots.) Nevertheless, the layers of clouds were obvious and pronounced, and even in the still photo, you can almost see how the middle layer of whitish clouds was moving in a completely opposite direction of the other two darker layers.

Layers of Cloudy Chaos

This contrary movement felt (and looked) ominous. Inside, it felt (and looked) as though all the curtains had been drawn and we were waiting for…something…to drop.

The quality of the thunder seemed different today as well. Instead of cracks of thunder, the evidence of lightning super-charging the air sounded more like what I might imagine bombs would sound like. Again, in spite of my fervent love of thunderstorms, I felt uneasy. And I was not alone.

The sun will come out tomorrow (to coin a phrase). I know that.

But I have to admit, witnessing the rapidity with which everything flooded today here in our neck of Pennsylvania, I feel a deep concern for New Orleans, as well as many other low-lying coastal areas. It’s not even the middle of July yet and New Orleans is staring down the arrival of its first hurricane of the season, which is expected to make landfall over the weekend. And we’re only at “B” in the season’s naming process.

Even the concept of climate change seems quaint at this point. We are in the midst of a full blown climate crisis. We need to stop pussy-footing around this truth and bring all of our formidable resources (both creative and economic) to bear on responding to the reality of this truth.

Within minutes of today’s deluge – Photo: L. Weikel

What I guess I don’t understand is why people feel a need to argue the origin of this crisis. Our climates are changing radically all over the Earth. Regardless of ‘who’ or ‘what’ started it, the ice at the poles and the permafrost as well are melting exponentially faster than had been predicted. Everything is changing – again, exponentially more rapidly – as a result. We cannot afford to continue this insane pattern of denial.

Yes, the darkness that overlay the area today was, arguably, a passing storm. But I can feel in the core of my being that we are whistling past the graveyard as we continue to pretend there’s “nothing to see here.” Darker days are ahead if we do not act now to demand better of our lawmakers. This provincial, head-in-the-sand, fingers-stuck-in-our-ears repeating “lalalalalala” approach to this climate crisis is the epitome of darkness.

We need to stop denying what’s right before our eyes. We must refuse the temptation to retreat and accept the darkness. Together we must shine our Light on this crisis – and demand immediate action and accountability.

(T-869)