Summer is over on the northern side of the equator but probably not for the reasons you expected. I suppose it’s determined by what one considers "end" and "summer" but I’ve recorded unmistakable signs, not so much upon the physical world but through digital footprints.
There are several candidates that could mark the end of the summer and I will focus on the United States specifically. I will review them briefly but I will note that all of them wrong as I will demonstrate momentarily.
However one defines the end of summer, I hope everyone has an opportunity to enjoy the weather while it’s still nice. We took advantage of the situation by going on a short hike and picnic at Great Falls Park along the Potomac River a few miles west of Washington, DC where the coastal plain meets the rockier Piedmont region.
We had a nice time there as we always do (here’s a description and a brief video from a visit a couple of years ago). It was much less crowded than I expected given the perfect weather but I consider that a bonus. I guess everyone was at the beach.
Labor Day. Many people, particularly those who own automobile dealerships, cling to the silly notion that the Labor Day weekend marks the end of summer. Those of you outside of the U.S. are now thinking, "Labor Day? — I thought that’s why there’s a May Day.". Right. Just like our stubborn refusal to adopt the Metric System and or insistence on calling football soccer, we celebrate the dedication of workers on the first Monday in September. Labor Day has been a Federal holiday since 1884 and the September date was chosen specifically to avoid May Day. Don’t try to understand it. Accept it as fact on move on.
It’s a symbolic ending, and I think it may have something to do with children going back to school immediately following the holiday. For them, certainly summer ended with the passage of the holiday weekend. Many (most?) schools now start a week or even two weeks before Labor Day now so I’m not sure whether the same symbolic association continues to exist as strongly as it once did in previous decades.
Meteorology. Meteorologists often speak of the end of "meteorological summer" which they define as the end of calendar month August. As soon as the clock ticks over to September 1, meteorological summer is done. However, they do concede that it’s a term of convenience rather than the actual end of real summer.
I admit that I like this definition. It’s simple. Flip the calendar page and its not only a new month but and a new season. Also mentally it seems to fit for me too, living in a temperate climate affected by seasonality. I imagine there are people further south that would disagree emphatically that summer ends with August, as they swelter through September and into October.
Astronomical. The United States Naval Observatory says that summer ends north of the equator on September 23, 2010 at 3:09 am Universal Time, with the arrival of the Autumnal Equinox. This is probably the definition that gets the most attention since its based on the predictable tilt of the Earth’s axis with respect to the Sun: the plane of the earth’s equator matches up with the center of the Sun twice a year very exactly. The moments can be calculated outward for many years, marking spring and autumn.
All of these methods are fine for some purposes but they are all wrong. There is a better method for calculating the end of summer: the herd mentality of people. Crowdsourcing is all the rage and I’ve uncovered a perfect example.
The Twelve Mile Circle Method. Summer ended on Saturday, August 21, 2010. I know this because visitors to the Twelve Mile Circle told me and I believe them. It wasn’t verbalized, rather it was their collective actions that signaled a turning point between the seasons. Most of the visitors to this site don’t read the blog. They use search engines to pop onto one of the permanent travel pages, particularly the ferry pages. It’s not uncommon for a single one of the ferry pages to generate more traffic than all of the blog pages combined during the summer.
There are short-term and long-term traffic patterns. A weekly cycle defines the most visible short-term pattern. Traffic is almost always highest on Monday, then it slides slowly downward throughout the week until it bottoms-out on Saturday. On Sunday it starts to climb again and on Monday the pattern begins anew. I don’t know why. My theory is that people use my pages as they research weekend getaways, probably from their bleak office cubicles when they should be working. They don’t hit the page on Saturday because they’re on the trip they planned earlier in the week.
An annual cycle defines the best long-term pattern. Traffic peaks during the summer then it slides slowly until Christmas and New Years, then climbs gradually until spring when it picks up steam quickly and goes nuts into the summer. This year it peaked on August 21 and it has been trending downward for the last couple of weeks. I’d need to create some wintertime content, maybe some skiing pages or something, or focus more topics on the Southern Hemisphere if I wanted to smooth that out a bit.
You, the people who actually read the blog, are part of the privileged class. You don’t demonstrate a seasonal pattern. You’re like the permanent residents of a beach town. The tourists leave, the midway shuts down, the saltwater taffy stand and ice cream parlor fall silent. We’ve got the Twelve Mile Circle all to ourselves now. Let’s enjoy the peace and quite for the next few months until the masses return next spring.
Has it really been five years already? The memories are starting to fade but they come back to life in ghostly form on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, when the news media forces me to pay attention to them. Our family was one of the lucky ones. I can’t and won’t compare our story to those who fared much worse. My heart goes out to those who suffered through staggering hardships and still struggle to recover. I was even luckier personally, sitting safely away, 1,200 miles distant while various family members battled the storm’s wrath.
I decided I better write some of this down before I lose even more of the details. They are bleeding away rapidly with the passage of time.
I do have a few photographs to help me remember the events, and I’m going share some of them with you today. They were taken by family members in the days immediately following Katrina unless marked otherwise.
I’d been visiting family along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in the suburbs of New Orleans, Louisiana just a few weeks before the storm. I go down there often and this trip seemed no different than any of the dozens of others I’d made the same journey over the years. Hurricanes are a fact of life along the coast. Why would this one be any different?
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This is where my wife and I went out to dinner one evening that summer. My mom was gracious enough to watch our son so we could get some quiet time alone. Katrina would wipe the Dock of the Bay restaurant from the face of the earth in short course. The current (August 2010) version of Google Street View for Bay St. Louis, Mississippi still provides a label for that nonexistent place along the bayfront, a phantom reminder of what once stood here. Go ahead an pop that map into a larger image and walk along Beach Boulevard towards the railroad bridge. You’ll see plenty of gutted shells and empty lots where a vibrant strand of homes, shops and restaurants stood until August 2005.
This was once a home several miles inland. Notice the trees snapped by the wind.
Most of my family fled from the area as warnings grew increasingly frantic. They scattered to the relative safety of Natchez, Houston and the Florida Panhandle. One of my sisters remained. It was a different storm along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, ferocious and intense with an immediate storm surge unlike the slow-motion misery that would engulf New Orleans. She didn’t realize, nobody realized, the surge would punch inland several miles along bayou conduits.
She called my father as water poured through the doorway and rose towards the ceiling. She sought refuge along with her three children in an attic crawlspace above the garage, water still rising, and then the conversation ended. The local phone network succumbed to the winds. For the next 36 hours we considered them dead, dreading notification as next of kin. We didn’t know until later that somehow they’d kicked a hole through the attic with their feet and climbed atop the roof. There they remained exposed to the elements for several hours as the hurricane eyewall and then the backside of the storm crossed above them, and twelve feet of torrential storm surge turned their precarious perch into an island.
This mess remained after the water subsided, some objects knocked about with others seemingly untouched.
They were safe once the storm passed and the surge dissipated. A local Southern Baptist congregation open its doors and provided refuge for many battered families that first night, where pews became makeshift beds. The house was unsalvageable and her car had to be junked after floating into to a neighbor’s yard. They lost everything but the few items that could be scavenged from their waterlogged home several days later, but they were alive.
My brother-in-law was a policeman in one of the most devastated communities along the Gulf Coast. The officers retreated to their station only a few hundred feet from the coastline, a solid bunker designed withstand hurricane-force winds with ease. They understood the danger but they had a duty to aid the populace once the storm passed. The building held firm and provided refuge until it disappeared under the storm surge. He and several other officers clung to a tree for their lives and somehow avoided being swept into the Gulf, their grips so tight that they stripped the bark under their hands. Today he is no longer a policeman, nor does he live anywhere near the Gulf Coast. I’d call that a rational choice given the circumstances.
Another home stood, first floor gutted by storm surge. Notice the dresses hanging from the rafters, unscathed.
The aunt of another brother-in-law rode out the storm from her bayfront home. She was not as lucky. She simply disappeared along with her house and everything she owned, never to be seen again. Gone. The only evidence remaining was a concrete slab where her home once stood.
Two of my nephews were caught on Interstate 10 trying to flee New Orleans in advance of the storm. They were stuck for hours but made it out in the nick of time. A few weeks later they got to experience it all over again when Hurricane Rita rolled through their temporary refuge in Houston, Texas.
Signs of destruction remained even five years later.
It doesn’t take much effort to find evidence of Hurricane Katrina even five years later. I confirmed that for myself when I was down there in April 2010. Remnants are beginning to fade though, along with the collective memory. This was the first visit where every conversation didn’t turn eventually to the simple phrase, "well, before Katrina…" It still came up but not continuously, similar to the found objects in the woods that are being pulled gradually back into the earth by undergrowth. Houses are beginning to spout on the exact foundations swept clean earlier. Let’s hope stricter building codes prevail when the inevitable returns.
My kids still call my mother Grandma Hurricane, much to her chagrin.
Most people probably drive down to Alaska‘s Kenai Peninsula for the scenery and the wildlife, and that’s also true for me. Sure, I enjoyed poking around some of the more unusual aspects of Kenai geography but that doesn’t mean I haven’t taken advantage of every opportunity to marvel at the natural beauty that attracts every other tourist to this region.
I’ll focus on some of the wildlife I’ve observed in today’s posting.
It’s impossible to avoid contact with wild critters of every stripe down here. Stay far away from the Kenai if you have an unnatural fear of large animals. They are everywhere on the land, in the sea and in the air. They cannot be avoided. Most people would consider that a benefit, and so do I.
I ventured onto the obligatory half-day cruise out of Seward into Kenai Fjords National Park along with a horde of tourists from a cruise ship port of call on a picture-perfect day. Honestly, we’ve had amazing weather this trip with only a single rainy morning the day we traveled to Whittier. Everyone we met who lives here says this has been an exceptionally cold summer with constant rain. We’re lucky to hit a dry, sunny patch. Coastal Alaska is noted for its abundant rainfall and we’d planned accordingly. We’ve been pleasantly surprised.
Can you believe I actually shot this image of a juvenile humpback whale breaching? Don’t be fooled, I am not a nature photographer. This took about thirty attempts of blurred images, near misses and random whale body parts to capture.
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We’d sailed out to see the glaciers and headed back along the shallow coves of Aialik Bay’s western shore. The captain spotted a spout far in the distance. We crept slowly towards the target, expecting to see another tail fin or perhaps an arched back like we’d already experienced several times earlier in the day. Instead we found a young humpback whale cavorting with his/her mother; breaching, rolling, and behaving like a child of any species. Mama rolled, nuzzled and slapped her fins encouragingly while junior frolicked and played nearby. This went on for about twenty minutes. I figured it was something unusual seen when I noticed the ship’s crew grabbing their cameras.
Moose live everywhere accessible on the Kenai. Frequent road signs warn drivers to remain on the lookout to avoid serious injury to moose and human alike. We’ve seen moose tracks constantly with plenty of evidence of foraging. We just haven’t seen many actual moose. I guess that’s probably because we hike with our own brand of wildlife repellent: a four-year-old and an eight-year-old, with a constant stream-of-consciousness banter between them. Indigenous creatures know we’re coming from a mile away and give us wide berth.
That’s probably why we haven’t seen a wild bear either and I’m perfectly happy to skip a wildlife encounter of that variety. We saw bears safely behind a fence at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and that’s good enough for me. The kids, who compiled their own list of animals they wanted to see during their visit, say that "counts." What a relief!
Our up-close moose encounter actually took place in the middle of town during broad daylight. Mother and child moose foraged along the roadside in a residential area, right in somebody’s front yard. We pulled our car over onto a wide shoulder and watched them graze for awhile. This image was the best of my collection of moose-butt photos. I can’t seem to convince the wildlife to stop, turn around, and smile for the camera.
It’s exciting to view an American Bald Eagle, such an iconic symbol of the United States. This doesn’t happen often back home in the Lower 48. However they’re practically as common as pigeons up here in Alaska. I got a chill the first few times. Now I’ve almost become blasé: "oh yeh, another bald eagle, yawn." They are amazingly easy to spot. The white patch is a dead giveaway that can be seen from great distances.
A mountain goat, by contrast, is something I’ve never seen in the wild before and I’ve spotted only this one specimen. The Kenai and Chugach Mountains, where I’m spending my time, are right at the northern fringe of the mountain goat range. Generally they confine themselves to the very highest terrain above the treeline. That makes them a tad bit difficult to spot or photograph, at least by me, because I spend most of my time safely down in the valleys. For some unknown reason this guy decided to descend from his usual alpine habitat so I could get a good, close view.
Steller Sea Lions inhabit various rocky outcrops along the coastal North Pacific. I don’t know what makes one rock any better than the others but the sea lions seem to have a innate understanding. There will be a hundred stony shelves all seemingly equal to my untrained eye. Nonetheless the sea lions always congregate on the same one. Maybe fish school there, maybe the sun is a little warmer, maybe it’s tradition. Regardless, there they were, hanging out on the rock with no particular concerns.
