Winter Storm Jasper

What a remarkable change a day can make, out here on the edge of the ocean where the wind is unimpeded, where weather comes and goes with gale-force, dramatic speed.  Thursday the weather was so mild that I almost felt overdressed in shorts and T-shirt, two easy miles the day after those Bath House Intervals the previous day.  We had been watching the weather carefully, and we knew this would be our last day to stock up on essentials before the next storm, named Jasper, arrived.  So we made a trip to Friendly Market and the grocery store after lunch.  Both places were crowded with shoppers who had the same idea, but we wore masks and tried to distance ourselves from others.

After we returned it was 62 degrees, and we decided to walk on the beach – perhaps our last outdoor exercise for a day or two, we thought.  Could they be right about the impending ice storm?  It was hard to believe that temperatures could plummet 30 degrees overnight.  We found two more sea stars, a Common Sea Star (below) and another small Royal Sea Star.

I had been wondering why some call these creatures starfish and others call them Sea Star.  I read that marine biologists are trying to encourage the latter term because these creatures are not fish at all, they are echinoderms, in the same class as sea urchins and sea cucumbers (which we have only seen in the aquarium).  Since I am proudly on the side of science in these troubling times, I will side with the marine biologists from now on!

The wind shrieks in this condo, more than we ever heard in the place we stayed in previous years, which is more sheltered from the northerly wind.  It sounds, Martha said the other day, like a tea kettle.  You keep wanting to take if off the burner.  When we awoke on Friday, the tea kettle was shrieking away and the palm trees were rattling wildly.  We did not leave the condo all day and were glad we were well-provisioned.  It was a good afternoon for a game of scrabble.

The forecast still sounded intimidating.  Martha had signed up for the Clam Chowder Cook-off, organized by the N. C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort, an event that we have attended in past years but this year was going to be curbside-pickup only due to Covid.  But forecasters were still advising that there would be power outages due to ice on power lines and falling trees, and urging people not to travel at all.  There are three high bridges between Atlantic Beach and Beaufort, all of them likely to be treacherous. We learned that the Cook-off had been postponed until next Friday, and we also learned that many businesses were closing early.  The rain was blowing and there was a little sleet and snow mixed with it.

I realized again how vulnerable we are here in the event of a power outage.  In Highlands, I keep fresh gasoline down by the basement and can drag out our small generator in weather like this, enough to power the furnace and even our router and computers so we can check the news.  Here there is no generator or backup heat source.  So we turned up the heat before going to bed and I put masking tape on the cracks around that shrieking front door, expecting to wake up in the dark.

But fortunately we still had power this morning, and I opened the curtains on a sight I have never seen before out here – ice frozen in the palm trees and dune vegetation.

I wanted to do my Tai Chi in the open, covered area under the building, out of the gale-force north wind, but ended up doing it in the hallway outside, in front of the elevators (which I did not want to risk getting stuck inside).  The stairwell was a solid sheet of ice.

Ice dangled from the railings everywhere, and the parking lot out front was shining brightly with perhaps a half-inch of ice.

So here we are, the power still on (for now), but the tea kettle still shrieking.  It has warmed up to 30 degrees, 17 mph north wind, and ice everywhere.  The Saturday morning long run has been cancelled.

Time to get the Scrabble Board out again after lunch!

P. S.  Martha learned that the tires washed up on the beach (see last post) came from artificial fish habitat reefs, disturbed by the storm.