Storm Watch

Cloudy, warm, and very humid here in Norfolk on this early Saturday morning. After doing its thing in Florida late yesterday, Hurricane Charley is over the Atlantic and heading for the Carolinas, the effects of which should be felt here late this afternoon and evening. We shouldn't see anything more than just a strong tropical storm, but as such storms are so unpredictable, who knows. Since the ground here is so saturated from weeks of heavy rain, the biggest concern is just how many trees Charley is going to bring down.

Despite their destructive nature (and perhaps because of it), hurricanes are quite the fascinating phenomenon. It's humbling to experience such raw power; in the ultimate contest of man versus nature, the latter reins supreme. We can deforest and pollute the Earth, exploit it of mineral and ecological wealth, and mold it, change it's landscape to suit our own interests, but from time to time nature shows us that she's still boss. No matter the length humans go to set themselves apart from nature, to raise themselves up from everything else in the world, its but a fanciful dream easily crumbled by water, wind, and other natural elements.

I've long been fascinated by storms. I was born during a severe summer thunderstorm (or so I was told anyway) and remember as a kid the excitement of approaching storms: the dark, angry clouds gathering on the horizon, the distant rumble of thunder growing ever louder, and the first few drops of rain from the darkened sky. Back in my single digit years, my family and I would often sit on the screened back porch and watch the approach of storms, at least until an ear-splitting crack of thunder and lightning sent us scurrying for safety inside the house.

One of my fondest childhood memories was walking the fields behind the house after a heavy storm. On many occasions, rainfall was heavy enough to wash away the topsoil between the rows of whatever crop was planted that year which often revealed a treasure trove of scattered Native American and colonial era artifacts (points, pottery, buttons, pipe stems, etc) on the surface just waitint to be picked up. While I've since learned that such "pothunting" is discouraged by those in the archaeological profession, I was unaware of this as a kid and spent many blissful hours walking up and down the rows picking up this and that and returning to the house muddy and wet with hands full of newfound objects that needed to be washed, dried, and sorted into various collection boxes. I believe it was archaeologist James Deetz who called such fragments of material culture "treasure without price." This is certainly true as in the monetary sense, such bits and pieces of the past are worthless. But to a daydreamer of a kid growing up on the old family land, they are indeed priceless.

I haven't walked those fields in over 15 years and I suppose my old artifact collection is still at my parent's house, stored away with the other once-cherished remnants of growing up in rural Virginia.