Chinese Lanterns

We left Highlands on an unseasonably warm Sunday morning.  It had been so warm that some of our crocuses were beginning to appear a day after the New Year had begun, and later in the day we saw daffodils blooming in Brevard and Asheville.

It had rained during the night but it stopped for the most part, and it was a good day for travel, overcast skies and little traffic.  We usually break up the nearly-500-mile journey to Atlantic Beach into two days, and this year we decided to stay one night in Cary, NC.  Martha had wanted to see the Chinese Lantern Festival there for several years and somehow it had never worked out, but this year it fitted perfectly in our plans, and she even found a motel only two miles away from Koka Booth Amphitheater.

I liked the idea of lantern festivals, held all over Asia, which Britannica explains may have originated as far back as the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE).  Buddhist monks would light lanterns on the 15^th day of the lunar year in honor of the Buddha, but later the festival extended to honoring all deceased ancestors.  “The Lantern Festival aims to promote reconciliation, peace, and forgiveness.”

The weather forecast had been calling for rain all day, and I kept checking the radar app on my phone, just as I would had we been running a race.  We have run marathons and half marathons in the rain, and would not have been dissuaded from the Festival merely because of the weather.  But I was also concerned about being in a crowded venue with the Omicron Variant on the loose.  We checked in at our motel, then ate an early dinner at the nearby MacGregor Draft House and easily drove the two miles to the Festival under darkening skies but still not a drop of rain.

We were among the first to arrive for the evening, and the venue was not crowded at all.  We immediately found ourselves in a long corridor filled with paper lanterns, overhead and along both sides, and absolutely beautiful!  We wandered the pathways looking at the other displays, some of them animated, all of them works of art.

Many of the displays were animated, and I managed to capture some of them in videos, huge peacocks opening their tails, creatures from under the sea swimming in the warm Cary air, lotus blossoms opening and closing.  It was all very lovely.

 

 

After we had made our way through all of the displays, we gathered with many other festival-goers at the stage to watch a performance by Chinese acrobats and performers.  There were quick-change artists, a young woman spinning hula hoops, a traditional fan display, and finally a woman on a unicycle tossing bowls onto her head.  We were uncomfortable with the crowd in front of the stage, and although our socially-distanced vantage point was a good one, alas, all of my photos of these dazzling performances turned out to be too distant and  blurry to post. 

We made our way back to the motel then in light rain, but it was not until an hour or two later that we heard the storm arrive in full force, rain blowing horizontally against the windows and thunder sounding during the night – in January!  It was an all-too-real reminder that we are living in a time of unprecedented global climate change.  In the morning the rain was still coming down, and we learned that there was flooding throughout the area.  Reporters from the Raleigh television station were on-screen in the motel breakfast room standing in front of overflowing creeks and flooded fields.  And traffic along I-40-East – our route this morning – had slowed to a crawl due to flooded lanes and traffic accidents.  We checked the internet, and saw that Highlands had received snow, treacherous roads, and power outages overnight.  We had escaped just in time!  A photo posted by The Highlander Newspaper showed Fifth Street, the very street where I had run on Saturday morning, temperatures in the upper 50s.  What a drastic change!

There was some precipitation halfway between rain and sleet coming down when we left the motel, and at the bottom of the hill, across from MacGregor’s, a river was nearly out of its banks and the woods were flooded.  We made our way cautiously to I-40 in light rain, noticing several cars stopped on the shoulder of the road.  One of them was facing backwards, as if they had skidded a few times and landed there.  But neither the conditions nor the grounded cars slowed down many vehicles that rocketed past us at 70 or 80 miles per hour, weaving between us slower and more cautious drivers.

At last we exited the interstate and made our way, in lessening rain, through Goldsboro, Kinston, and New Bern toward Morehead City, finally arriving at the oceanfront place in Atlantic Beach where we were staying.  The rain had stopped but the wind was picking up, 25 or 30 mph, but I went out onto the familiar dune-top deck after we had unpacked the car to see the great wide Atlantic Ocean, waves breaking and rising into the air and dissolving in the wind, and a wind so sharp that it cut like a knife.  It was good to be here again, I thought, good to be experiencing the wild ocean and the leaping waves, and to hear the wind whistling through the door before we went to bed and shaking the steel balcony rails all night long.  Good to have arrived safely.