Rants from the Hollow

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.)

In 2001, we moved from Vienna, Virginia to Vienna, Austria, followed in September by a move to Virginia Water, England. The result has been perpetually confused mail, and a variety of summertime experiences.

As I sit here in 91 degree weather, thankful that the humidity is only about 60% (both expected to rise this week), I can’t help missing the incredibly mild and pleasant English summers. Of course, if you want to lie down on the hammock some Saturday afternoon, reading a novel, you need a blanket.

The insects in America are very different from the ones in England. While I complain about the squash vine borers sabotaging my cucurbits, I really enjoy the fireflies. Elizabeth and I have sat on the back deck, watching the twinkling twilight show. The other American bug I’m glad to see again, and this is a taste that she does not share with me, is the cicada. I love the sound of the cicadas up in the trees, whirring away in unison, and then suddenly going silent. The evening sound of crickets is another one that feels like home to me.

After the biggest snowfall on record, and a last frost date that came at least a month early, last Friday brought the gnarliest-looking hailstones I’ve ever seen.

They were described as ‘quarter sized’ by the weather service. It’d be an exaggeration to say ‘golf ball sized’, but a number of the stones were flat and bumpy, and about the same size as sliced golf balls. The spherical stones were smaller, about the size of shooter marbles.

The storm made a huge racket, and lasted for several minutes, leaving the yard littered with ice balls and fallen debris.

Outside of a couple tomato and potato leaves, the garden came through the storm intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my Subaru.

We’ve seen some unusual weather since returning to the US, and the unseasonably hot & dry spring probably accounts for the failure of the lambs lettuce and spinach crops. Presuming that the mild spring would last, I planted some tomatoes and squash two weeks early, and as it turned out, I could have planted them a couple weeks earlier than that.  This being my first year back in the garden, it was too much of a mess to start planting the first week of March (my excuse is that I was waiting until the pine trees came down), but even if I’d wanted to, there was still snow on the ground.

I wonder what summer is going to bring.

Yesterday, I circumnavigated the 55 almost square acres of Heiser Hollow. I like to walk the bounds every year (at least since the neighbor had the southern property line surveyed), but this summer, I was especially curious about the storm damage, which cut two narrow swathes of trees across the entire width of the property.

The storm damage started on the western edge, parallel to the drive, topping a couple of maple trees, one of which the guys from the power company helped us clear last week. A couple hundred feet further south, 3-4 tall white pines were topped, about 30-40′ in the air. A sort of sickly looking cherry tree was down next to them, not topped, but with the root ball pulled out of the ground.

Several trees came down alongside the road leading down into the valley, and they’ll have to be chainsawed if we want to use the road any time soon. One tree was down in the valley, and then there was no damage for several hundred feet. Along the path we call the Ridge Trail, which parallels the eastern property line, a group of 5 trees were all snapped off at about 40 feet in the air. This is the strangest storm damage I’ve ever seen at the Hollow. It looks like a rotary blade descended from the sky, chopped off some trees, and then retracted.

A couple hundred yards to the north, the damage was very different, but more extensive. Instead of topping the trees, it toppled them. The combination of wet soil and high winds resulted in at least a dozen trees pulling up roots and falling over. Mostly leaving the useless aspen and poplar untouched, the freak wind concentrated on valuable hardwoods

In this picture, Elizabeth is standing next to a 20″ cherry tree which has fallen on the root ball of a 2nd cherry, which itself is lying on top of the roots of a 3rd tree. In addition to the cherries, at least one ash came down, which is especially sad given that ash in other parts of the state are struggling with borer.

There are probably enough timber grade trees down to make it worth having a small lumber operator coming in and harvesting them.

The map below shows a simplified view of the damaged (red) and downed (yellow) trees. It looks very much like two separate wind cells, several hundred feet apart, cut parallel paths. We heard that a funnel cloud was sighted about a mile to the east.

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