Proof Positive of Insanity (but not mine)

An unlikely feature from the Travel section of Thursday's New York Times:

BLACK shapes bobbed on big waves out from shore. Through the pine trees off Stoney Point Drive, past parked cars idling with their heaters cranked on, the surfers of Lake Superior waited to catch a wave.

It was a Sunday morning north of Duluth, Minn., and a blizzard had overtaken the region. The surfers — apparitions in black neoprene, floating in mist far offshore — paddled and stood when a wave began to break....

All around the Great Lakes, from breaks on Lake Michigan to western New York and Lake Erie’s shore, a freshwater surfing scene has emerged in recent years. On Lake Superior, where winds swoop hundreds of miles across open water, surfers swim and paddle year-round to ride waves as tall as 20 feet, rushing tsunamis tumbling on an inland sea.




Read the rest.

There's a love of winter and then there's batshit crazy.

Seriously, I feel respect for the people who do this. Their sport requires both smarts and guts in large measures. And they certainly can't let concerns about their equipment slide. If I have a leak starting in my waders, I might let it go for a day. For Superior surfers, that could be a fatal error.

Actually, I think I would enjoy a day of this--in the capacity of a spectator. I'd be glad to keep the coffee hot.

(a later thought: imagine "Wipeout" rendered on accordion and fiddle...)

A Leap Day Update

Can't believe it's been over a month since I updated. I knew I was letting the blog slide, but the guilt stings a little more after seeing the numbers. At least I didn't let an entire month lapse (thanks to a quadrennial calendar quirk).

As I said in a Twitter note, I've been super busy, mostly because I'm launching a couple of new courses and needing to make a lot of midstream adjustments. But I'm having fun with them, most of the time. The best experience has been a writing class pairing my students with some kids from an inner city high school to survey some residents of their neighborhood and prepare a report of their findings to a community service agency. Here is one team (some of my students on the left side of the desk, the high schoolers on the right), banging out a draft:


Most of my students came away from the experience feeling it had left some mark on them. One said he hadn't realized his studies could make a difference in the real world; several got their first exposure to the inner city, and felt anywhere between suprised to dumfounded by the differences between "how we live and how they live down there," as one put it. Many were also impressed by the determination by people in that community to improve conditions there. As am I. I hope to make this project (a collaboration with a community foundation) a long term venture.

Other than that...we've been riding wild swings of weather here, with stretches of frigid weather broken by irruptions of April. After one sudden thaw, I went to take some pictures of swollen rivers to show my students next fall exactly how a floodplain works. Here's the Ottawa River outside Toledo, OH where it meanders through a local metropark. The river is ordinarily forty feed wide here:



Kristine and I went cross country skiing near Grayling a couple of weeks ago and got smacked by both ends of a weather shift. Saturday morning the temperature was near O (F); we had a fine, cold sunny afternoon of skiing with temps peaking near 20. An overnight warmup was expected with freezing rain by late the next morning. We planned to rise early for a last ski, but opened the motel door to see our car already covered with half an inch of ice. We got breakfast, then hit I-75 to inch home with a train of disappointed snowmobilers.

We're going north again this weekend to ski near Tawas City. The forecast looks similar, but the ice shouldn't hit until at least 11am Sunday. If weatherunderground.com was wrong about that, I'm suing.

Happy 2008

Good New Year to all.

Snow began falling last night during the final hour of 2007 and kept up until well into the morning. It's nice to see after losing most of our snow to heavy rains the weekend before last.

A few scenes along the road in front of Casa Shupac:




It's wet, heavy stuff, and I spent two hours shoveling my 75' driveway. Anymore, though, I don't mind the routine outside chores as much as I used to. If I can't go have fun, they still give me the chance to get outside and move the body a bit.

As the new year gets started, my efforts at resuscitating FTR continue with Opax joining my stringer o' links. Check it out for sisu-fuelled Finnish fly escapades. Not to mention a sweet link list of its own.

No Ski for Me

Kristine and I had been planning a cross country ski trip over the New Year's holiday weekend. Earlier this week though, we squashed those plans due to a lack of snow at our intended destination. We could head to western Michigan, where snow has been returning, but I have too much work on my plate now to spare 3 days away, so this is just as well. Still the paucity of snow in most of lower Michigan the last few years is disappointing. Sometimes, we haven't had enough snow in the UP for New Year's ski trip there--that's seriously screwed up.

Winter doesn't feel like winter without snow on the ground from the end of December to the beginning of March or so. It doesn't feel like a protracted fall, either. It feels like nothing, or, I should say, makes familiar ground feel somehow unreal. This is really all I needed to accept global climate change as a reality.



Links are in the process of being restored--if I've forgotten you, or if you'd like me to add you to this august collection, leave a comment.