Rants from the Hollow

Big Max pumpkin, 62 pounds.

Saturday July 24, several waves of severe storm crossed Lake Chautauqua.  At 5pm, a tornado warning was announced. The view from this dock in Jamestown, at the southern end of the lake, was impressive. A huge wall cloud, miles across, blew across the sky to the north.

The picture of the wall cloud below is a panorama, stitched together from 9 frames that I took handheld with my Canon G9. If you click on it, you’ll get a much larger image (hint–click on that image to see it full size–you’ll need to scroll back and forth).  My guess is that the nasty gray knot at the far right is whatever is left of the F2 tornado that crossed the north end of the lake, touching down 10 minutes earlier, 15 miles beyond the sail boat in the far left.  Somewhere in this wall cloud is the remnant of that twister.

From our vantage point on the dock, we had a perfect view of the squall line, watching the wind, rain, and white caps approach from 5 miles away. It hit hard, with strong winds and heavy rain.

A local television station has some impressive video footage of the actual tornado and map from the National Weather Service.

Here’s a statement from the National Weather Service with more details.

Edited video by Jim Grimaldi on YouTube showing the tornado and some of the damage.

If you can’t view my video, here’s a version in Shockwave.

Driving down Whites Ferry Road on the Maryland side of the ferry, it was clear to us that this was an exceptional storm, which had made a huge amount of damage. We carefully picked our way from side to side of the street to avoid fallen limbs and trees. One large branch fell down in front of us.

Our original plan was to head west towards 15 to look for a place to eat in Frederick, but all the roads were blocked by fallen trees.

We tried 2 different roads towards the west, but couldn’t get through.  We saw a transformer explode.  Finally, we reached a point where Whites Ferry road was blocked, too, so we decided to cut our losses and head back across the ferry.

The Potomac was calm again, but covered with floating leaves and branches. We chatted with some of the other people on the ferry and learned that River Road was partially blocked, but probably still open.

I was concerned that we’d be stuck on the other side of the river. Although there were some trees down, which slowed traffic, the road was open. The traffic light at route 15 was out, but we waited it out, and finally ended up in Leesburg for a late lunch, about an hour and a half after the storm came through.

[an alternative version of the River Road video in Shockwave.]

Kirk had never been to White’s Ferry, so last Sunday, I thought he’d enjoy the short trip across the Potomac on the Jubal Early. I knew that some storms were blowing through, and I’d been watching their progress on my iPhone, I’d lived through a squall and tornado warnings the day before at Chautauqua Lake, but I was still surprised by the ferocity of this thing.

It was very calm when we pulled onto the Jubal Early ferry. The Potomac was almost mirror calm.

The imminent arrival of a storm was clear to anyone looking up and seeing the gust front.  Within a minute or two, all hell had broken loose. The wind hit hard and fast.  Overhead, everything was churning, with sycamore trees writhing in the gale and countless bits of leaf, stick, and stuff not just blowing through the air, but churning in it.  The wind seemed to be blowing every which way at once.

The ferry, which is tied to both banks by heavy steel cables, stayed fairly stable, but the cars were buffeted by the wind. The waves in the Potomac were breaking over the side of the ferry.  A stack of red canoes that had been neatly piled along the bank had been blown all over the place (probably hitting some of the cars waiting to cross from Maryland to Virginia.

Although it continued to rain and blow for awhile, the heaviest winds were gone by the time Kirk drove us off the ferry on the Maryland side.  As you can tell from the video, we were mightily impressed by both the suddenness and the violence of the thing. It would turn out that the storm damage was much worse than we expected.  Sitting in the car in the middle of the river, we had ringside seats when the squall blew through, but it still didn’t prepare us for what we would encounter next.

(If the above video didn’t work, or if it shut off before we completed the crossing, a Shockwave version is available here.)

For the most part, I’m pleased with the way the garden has turned out. While it isn’t exactly providing a significant percentage of our family’s calories, most of it is doing alright.

I’ve got both dent corn and field corn tassling right now. They were planted at different times, but pollination has coincided to a greater degree than I’d hoped. I don’t know if my small blocks will be adequate for complete pollination or not–I’ll find out soon. I’ve got two more later plantings that are a bit thicker.

The beans on the right side of the picture, Genuine Cornfield, has turned on 8′ trellis into a vertical jungle. There must be 200 pounds of plant matter, but until this week, nothing looked like a flower bud. The Christmas Limas, behind the sunflowers, set a few seedpods, but nothing much came of it. Willowleaf Lima is not very lush, and still has no blossoms.
Last night, I picked enough hybrid bush Limas for several servings, serving them in olive oil with kosher salt and fresh sage. Elizabeth and Kirk are out of town, so that means another couple meals for me.

My attempts at planting onion didn’t work out very well. I harvested two very small bulbs this week. The smallest is just barely large enough for a double martini.

I’d saved a little more than half of my seed potatoes to plant for a fall crop, and I put them into the ground today. I’d left them in the basement, which was the coolest and darkest place I could find, but the potatoes had put a lot of energy into long stems and were looking more than pathetic. I wonder if they’ll grow.

I had visions of some sort of lush field of lovely yellow sunflowers, visible from my office window. I probably should have planted more than 6 of them.

Sunflowers, at least this variety, are considered a delicacy by just about everything that crawls, walks, or flies.  Half of my darling babies managed to survive a gauntlet of ground hogs, deer, and a bewildering variety of bugs, most of which are stink bugs, but at least one of which looked like a small scarab beetle.

Anticipating the benefits of heliotropism, I just assumed that the flowers would all sort of wave at me in my office window as the sun went over my head at noon.  Imagine my disappointment when the first two blossoms are pointed in almost opposite directions.  The seem to have issues with each other.

These are supposed to be MAMMOTH sunflowers.  One of them is about 5 foot tall, the other twice that (over 2 meters), with the third, which hasn’t yet bloomed, stuck in the middle. I expected a flower like a manhole cover on the biggest of these, if not on all of them.  What I got was a pinheaded sort of thing that barely unfolded today.

As it turns out, only the buds are heliotropic. Once they’ve flowered, they stay fixed, usually pointing east.  I’ve got one more yet to bloom, but at this point, the closest I can come to an entire girasol field, each facing the same direction in military discipline, will be for this one to split the compass difference, just as it split the height difference.  I wonder if it will bloom before the first flower (immediately above) is finished.