Last call for "Sunday Morning Sidewalk"

 On Saturday morning I woke up a year older. The good news was that I woke up. My wife and I had planned a trip to Franklin, North Carolina for a concert and an overnight stay. But a girl named Helene altered our plans and we stayed at home.

On Thursday morning with the weather forecast looking pretty grim, I had called the Smoky Mountain Performing Arts Center in Franklin where the concert was being held. I asked the lady who answered if they had decided to cancel or postpone the concert, that we were slated to attend. She told me, "No."

I explained that the weather forecast was not looking good and asked if they had looked at a news source recently. She said, "It's supposed to storm on Friday, but then Saturday looks like a pretty day." Stunned by this display of ignorance, I told her, "Honey, I grew up in Florida. If a hurricane comes through on Friday, it won't matter if the sun is out on Saturday. There are probably going to be some problems."  She said, "I guess that we will just wait and see."

When I got off the phone with her, my wife and I decided to cancel our trip. I told her that it wasn't worth risking my life to go to a concert the day after a hurricane hit.

For those of you wondering, sometime late on Saturday afternoon, they finally posted a "Postponed" notice online for the concert. I love being right!!

This story is symbolic of everything that went wrong on Friday and Saturday and continues today. We think that we can control everything, but we can't. As demonstrated by Katrina and discussed more than nineteen years ago in this blog, ( Random Moments of Lunacy: Nature 1 - Corps of Engineers 0) we can't control the weather. Regardless of your scientific beliefs, one must acknowledge that Mother Nature keeps proving that she is a pretty burly broad.

I lived in Tampa for twenty-four years. Mom dragged us down there in 1960. Two weeks after our arrival there, Hurricane Donna hit Florida. It did not hit Tampa directly, but it was still a bad storm. I asked Mom if we could go back to North Carolina. We didn't. I don't think that we had another hurricane hit Tampa before we left there in 1983. Several passed in the Gulf on the way to Louisiana, but they didn't stop to see us. You can look it up if you like, but few hurricanes actually hit Tampa directly. 

If you choose, you can listen to all of the "weather experts" on why there seem to more hurricanes affecting us. But these are the same guys who are wrong on what the weather will be tomorrow about half of the time.

A lot of the damage from weather is related to the arrogance of man. Last week, three or four houses on the North Carolina coast collapsed into the sea. If you build your home on stilts on the beach, you should have a Plan B. In the Bible, it speaks of the man who builds on sand. By the same measure, if you build your house on the side of a mountain with a "babbling brook" running in front of it, one day it will rain too much and your "babbling brook" becomes a whitewater rafting adventure and you don't have a boat.

People want to live where it is pretty. The plains are relatively empty for a reason. In the southern Appalachian Mountains, there have been flooding issues for hundreds of years. The landscape in the mountains is not conducive to meandering streams. We don't do whitewater rafting in the Piedmont area. You have to go to the mountains for that.

In 1933, the federal government created the Tennessee Valley Authority. They built dams on several rivers in the mountains in an effort to curtail the flooding that was a regular event at that time. They succeeded in that effort and the result was that a lot of people moved to the mountains. 

Last week we had several days of rain and then Helene came to see us. It was simply more rain than the mountains could handle. We have overbuilt there like we have overbuilt at the beach. We know all of this, yet we keep building. Why? Because the arrogance of man leads us to believe that we can do anything. Every once in a while, reality shows up for a check.

The schmucks who are trying to pass as our leaders keep telling us, "Follow the science." Here's some science for you. Barrier islands move. The beach is where the ocean meets the land. The ocean does not recognize property lines, it goes where it wants. Also, the ocean is where the sharks are. That has nothing to do with this topic, but it is good to remember. If you live at five feet above sea level, there will one day be a ten-foot wave coming in your direction. Water won't sit on the side of a mountain. Rivers travel the path of least resistance. Don't build there.

Let's clean up and build back a little more sensibly. This was a hundred-year storm, I probably won't see another one.

Finally, Kris Kristofferson died the other day at 88. My favorite Kristofferson song was "Sunday Morning Coming Down". I have used different lyrics from that song for post titles over the last many years. Kristofferson and I were probably from different planets, but I liked most of his music. Here's a link to "Sunday Morning Comin Down". (67) Kris Kristofferson - Sunday morning coming down (1970) - YouTube