The Year Without a Fall

The year without a fall, 2012.  Following the year with a devastating summer drought in the center of the country, and the year with a record lack of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.  Coming after the summer in March heat wave last spring, which followed plants blooming during January in Chicago.  And before that were the summer heat waves and droughts in 2010 and 2011 that cost, I don't know who paid for it, but those events cost billions and billions of dollars to mitigate.  And before that was Canada's warmest and driest winter in history.  Of course, people in the Northeast may not have known about that one because they were too busy shoveling the snow that was supposed to go to Canada.

But no matter how much I read about the drought and the damage it does, or about the ice-free Arctic Ocean, or about too much rain somewhere- things I now read about frequently- and I read about how homes and businesses are ruined.  This one died, that one died.  I read about it so much I was like 'yeah Texas looks like Mars right now from the drought, and North Dakota looks like a Great Lake from the flood' but those places always seemed so far away. 

As much as I could read the words and make pictures in my head to understand, it was only in my head.  I could make an image of the dusty soil, smell it, in my brain, but then I'd walk across the street, climb the steps over the dune, and go surf in a large body of water.  Everything outside of me looked ok, smelled ok, I could still hear the traffic, so whatever.  I was reading about, imaging about the drought here, the lack of ice here, the too much snow there, but I wasn't experiencing those things.

The new Mantoloking.

Until now.  You can read and read and read and look at maps and pictures and hear stories and watch television.  And you can hear about how the largest tributary in the Amazon almost dried up a few years ago, yeah yeah whatever.  Or about how farmers in Texas had to ship their dying cattle away because there was no water blah blah blah.  It's all somewhere else, it's not me, it's them, whoever they are, I don't know them.  And then it's your turn.  It's you.  You're the one cleaning up the shriveled up chickens in the yard.  Suddenly, you're the one who is ripping out the first floor becuase the water got too high, because there was too much water at once.  And then the rush of knowledge is overwhelming, because experience is a more complete teacher than some words and pictures on a screen.

My lifelong recurring dream of being able to see the waves from the house came true.  I take that to mean my other lifelong recurring dreams will also come true.

Getting bused into the island the other day, coming over the Mantoloking Bridge and seeing a giant open space where the inlet was already filled in, was something.  There were cranes, huge things, and lots of equipment.  It was strange and didn't look like home.  Police were everywhere, construction crews, and the National Guard was in sight almost continously.  One parking lot had been turned into an operations center and another was filled with a mountain of sand and debris.  The air stunk of deisel.  The effort looked extraordinary.  Since I have such an obsession with the weather, I used some time on the bus to think about the storm that was repsonsible for all this effort I was seeing, since I like to get to the root of things.

When the poles are cold, the line between the poles and tropics is stronger, and extratropical cyclones and tropical cyclones tend to be in their assigned places.

When the poles are cold, extratropical cyclones and tropical cyclones, in other words storms that have certain qualities, tend to stay in their assigned places.  It may seem odd, but usually the colder it is in Canada the warmer it will be in Florida.  That's because for as much as cold air in Canada wants to rush down to Florida, warm air from the tropics wants to rush towards the pole.  The battle between warm air moving north and cold air moving south tends to keep things where they should be.  A powerful hurricane may make it farther north than is usual, like in 1938, 1944, 1954 or 1960, but the storms in those years had the identity of a hurricane.

When the poles are warm, now, things get mushy and homogenized.  So you get storms whose identity is made from parts of both.  It this case it was the worst: broad wind field (extratropical) of strong winds (tropical).

With the poles warmer, nowadays, the division between the poles and the tropics is a lot miushier.  It's not like extratropical cyclones and tropical cyclones swirl around with a placard saying I am an extratropical cyclone or I am a tropical cyclone.  The storms just are, and there are certain similar qualities that humans observe and then classify the storms as either an extratropical cyclone or a tropical cyclone.  Like male and female.

And then you get a storm that comes along and it's like is that a guy or a girl?  I think it's a guy, but it looks like a girl.  Maybe it's a girl, she has nice legs, but it could be a guy.  What is it?  Is it an extratropical cyclone or a tropical cyclone?  It kind of has fronts, but it is also warm around the center.  The wind is high, but it should be a lot higher for how low the pressure is.  What is it?  Boy or girl?  Extratropoical or tropical?  What do we call it.  It's something between.  I never used to notice them before, now I am seeing them all over.

It was hard to believe that I was on the beach in November and was questioning whether or not I should go fishing.  However, I'm glad someone was trying.

The water was surprisingly clear and clean.

So 2012, for me, is the year without a fall.  No fishing.  No surfing.  No being near or in the ocean during what is normally the best season to do those things.  I felt like I was intruding when I went for a drive to look at the water yesterday.  And I got a very sure message that I was, which means I may not go to the beach again until the major repairs are over, even if it takes months.  All I could think to say to myself when I walked on the beach was that it looks like somewhere else.  It's somewhere else.  That's the same thing I used to say about the flood in Australia or the heat wave in Russia in 2010.  It's somewhere else.  It's somewhere else.  Now, IT'S HERE.