HURRICANE REDUX
The weather after a hurricane is always spectacular. Usually this goes unappreciated by those without power. The humidity dips and the air is scrubbed clean.

Last night, after dinner and before tubby time, my daughter and I were walking along the stretch of beach between the two seawalls. Her little feet padded into the soft sand, freshly deposited by the storm surge of two days ago. We maneuvered past stumps and assorted flotsam and jetsam. Then I spotted the crab trap.

Crab traps are posted like sentinels at regular intervals along our bay. This one had washed the 100 or so yards in and was sitting half submerged in the sand. Inside, about a dozen nervous blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus, literally "savory swimmer") were clinking about. They had been out of the water for awhile but blue crabs can tolerate that. I called my daughter over and she watched rapt as I opened the side mesh and started emptying the savory swimmers back into the bay.

As I jiggled and bounced the crabs from the upper compartment of the trap into the lower and finally out the opened side, I thought about the scenes of the day. Flooded roads in New Orleans (where I had the best soft-shelled crab off of Bourbon Street just a few months ago), the wholesale destruction of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Such a tragedy--somehow this small act, rescuing crustaceans from a wayward trap, seemed to ease my troubles.

The last, and one of the biggest crabs, clung stubbornly to the top mesh. "Come on partner," I said quietly. He no doubt had suspicions as to my motives. That comes with the territory when you are savory. I turned the trap and positioned him in the water along the bay's edge. That appeared to prove my intentions to him. He let go and slid down through the chamber and out. Silently he and his fellow ex-prisoners moved out into deeper water. I put the trap high up the beach, out of the way of the tide. Whoever owns it is welcome to it--they couldn't have gotten to the crabs in time though; and the savory swimmers should know that tomorrow they're fair game again.

We padded back up to the seawall and left sandy footprints down the road toward home.

My Aunt Jessie made the best gumbo. She knew that blue crabs were a crucial part. Their flavor does the bugaloo down in there with the other spices, coaxing a final taste out of everyone. Pieces of their claw and shell should be found in any authentic gumbo.

The watercolor comes from the artist Walter Anderson. He was an eccentric philosopher and painter who traveled in a ridiculously small boat off the coast of Mississippi to Horn Island to paint and ease his troubled mind. His book Horn Island Logs is full of wisdom hard won from a man not afraid to wade chest deep through a marsh to find and paint wildlife. It was his way of affirming the beauty of nature, by bearing witness. A museum of his works is (was?) located in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

HURRICANE!
In 1953, the National Hurricane Center began naming storms. Before that, they were simply referred to as "the storm of '03" or the "Galveston storm." Now, with names, we recall them as old nemeses, spitting out our tales of loss and tribulations.

I know what a hurricane can do. I lost an aunt and a cousin in Camille in 1969. She was a beautiful country girl a long way from home. They lived in a beachside home in Biloxi, MS and were oblivious to the danger churning out in the Gulf of Mexico. She and her son were killed by 200 mph winds and a wall of water in excess of 20 feet. I remember seeing the adults wandering from room to room, crying inconsolably. I was 5; my cousin was 4 when he died. I only have a dim memory of us playing together with toy cars. My uncle, who had to go identify the bodies, has never spoken much about it. He couldn't even tell where their house used to be.

I've been through a number of hurricanes now. I've stood in the eye, hot, sticky and ominous with the promise of future chaos. I've endured the sunburn, sore muscles and dehydration of the recovery after a storm which is inevitably worse than the storm itself. I've seen boats in streets and cars in bays, neither working as designed.

The last few storms have been different because now I have a small child who can't read coordinates on a map or appreciate the danger of the beautiful swirling image on TV. All she knows is Mommy and Daddy are home and we have to play inside because the wind is howling whoo whoo just like at Sam's house in the story Kiss Goodnight Sam, where a young bear is put to sleep on a stormy night by a combination of warm milk and kisses from Mrs. Bear. I hate that so many children's books don't have fathers in them.

So all day she plays with her multi-colored tea set while her mother and I watch the growing waves on the bay, advancing like white-tufted Visigoths. The rain starts and the ditches fill up with water. Waves crash over the seawall. We wait and worry. Finally, the waters begin to recede and in the late afternoon we all climb into Daddy's big Bubba truck to survey our little hamlet. We wave "bye-bye hurricane."

My daughter is such a trooper. Last summer, she went through two weeks without air conditioning, playing full tilt while small beads of sweat collected on her little nose. Her mother and I wilted in the heat. Life became very simple, dictated by sunlight, heat and physical labor. It was like a bad camping trip.

The remaining storm names for 2005 are: Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Phillipe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma. Some monikers get retired if the storm they conjure up is too painful to relive. You'll never see another hurricane Andrew or Camille. Is it a way of honoring the dead? I don't know.

Call me old-fashioned, but I liked it when hurricanes were named after women. That changed in 1979. I'm all for treating the sexes equally, but that doesn't mean I want to set foot on the S.S. Bob. Some things should be left the way they are strictly for aesthetics.

My Ax
Gibson Hummingbird. Sweet, honey-toned darlin'. I'd post more but unfortunately there's a hurricane heading my way so now it's time to board up windows, gas the cars, and, of course, take my sweet ax someplace safe from the storm.

I'll be back.

Childhood Artifacts

Once my friend Zack and I were discussing childhood artifacts. That's what we named them. Sometimes toys but they don't have to be; those relics from long ago that occupied a part of our lives and now live on as echoes, talismans from another age. We stare at them, worn from years of attention. Battle scarred by our affection.

For my friend Zack, it was a Boy Scout cooking gear set. The panhandle unscrews, reverses and unites with a nifty metal plate to hold the entire operation snug like a metal turtle.

For me, after much thought and some not insubstantial poking around old boxes like plumbing the depths of archealogical sites, I think it's The Search for Planet X.

This book, published in 1962 (look at the price!)--is essentially the story of Pluto's discovery. However, the book begins with Copernicus and recounts the history of those after him: Kepler, Galileo, Newton--guys now so well known they go by one name. It spans the first use of a telescope outside Florence, Italy by Galileo to Percival Lowell (of the Lowell, Massachusetts clan) "seeing" canals on Mars from a hilltop outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Heady stuff full of diagrams and pictures and formulas such as that for the Force of Gravity [G(m1 X m2)/d2 if you're interested].

Then it shifts to the story of hard-working Kansas farmboy Clyde Tombaugh who gets the astronomy bug, builds telescopes, starts observing and eventually gets invited to work at Lowell Observatory based on the strength of his handrawn pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the moon. He discovers Pluto in 1930 using a blink microscope--comparing pictures of the sky manually and seeing which objects move. I went to Lowell Observatory a few years ago and saw the actual plates which showed the movement. I felt like I was in a temple.

Galileo drew marvelously delicate pictures of the moon too. That was back when science and art were close cousins.

Baby Steps
So here goes nothing..... I've been reading several postings on the internet and think its time to add my voice to the cacophony. I will try to make this interesting and not driven by the fickle winds of mass media.

So to begin with and in no particular order:

1) My dog Chester once caught a mullet in his mouth.
2) My daughter has been on a Poky Little Puppy kick so I almost have that story memorized now. What good that does me I don't know.
3) My daughter is the cutest child on the face of the Earth (see above).
4) I have made the swim from the barrier island here in my hometown to the mainland about ten times now. The trick is to watch the current. One false move and here we come Mexico!
5) I just got done reading Dante--I didn't realize Hell was actually frozen.
6) I believe the anthropic principle ends the discussion on Intelligent Design. More on this later.
7) I have a big 12 incher (telescope you filthy minded people) and can name the four Galilean moons from memory. If that makes me a nerd so be it.
8) I was born the same year Dylan released Highway 61 Revisted and, oddly enough, I can play a number of those songs on guitar too.
9) I expect the ruby-throated hummingbirds back any day now.
10) I memorized Lewis Carrol's poem The Jabberwocky in the fourth grade and still can recite it.

That's a start.