T.S. / occasional Hurricane Ophelia has combined her efforts with that big high that used to cover the eastern seaboard and is making herself known up here, a thousand miles away from the eye wall bouncing off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. Here we are, expecting the start of Autumn in only a week and it's muggy enough to wring a cup of water from a t-shirt off your back. Fog. Let me tell you about fog. I sent the dog out at 5:00 this morning to perform her morning business and it was so foggy she couldn't see whether the turd was still hanging from her butt or not (it was). Not that I could see until she started by me into the house...
There are folks downeast in places like Rockland, Castine and Blue Hill that haven't seen their hands for a week – no matter HOW close they hold them to their eyes. Last night there was a collision on the Mount Desert Auto Road between a tour bus on the way up and a pregnant roller skate (Honda Civic street racer) from California on the way down. Seems they both tried to occupy the same center line as they swept around a curve in the fog. Fortunately, no one was killed.
A private plane, piloted by a man unfamiliar with the area and only possessing a VFR (visual flight rules) rating got twisted around when he flew into the fog bank and attempted to land in the fog at the Trenton airport. It's a big little airport just outside Ellsworth on the road to Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. While in winter it's a very quiet, lonely place, in summer they average over 60 flights a day, so have all of the goodies – tower controllers, strobe lights, runway and taxiway lighting and the like. It's the kind of place that Aspen is in winter. More private and leased twin engine business jets than you can shake a stick at are present at any given time with weekends just amazing for the sheer number of million dollar planes sitting in the parking areas. Anyway, this fellow attempted his first and damn near last attempt at landing in fog. It was only when he emerged from the fog to find his landing gear scraping the exhaust pipe on a lobster boat did he give up and head inland. At least that was what he told me after landing up here in Bangor.
So, with the residents of South and North Carolina being pounded by this storm, I, too, ask the weather gods to shake a leg and blow this bitch back out to sea. It's too muggy for my tastes by a long shot.
P.S. My picture of the Bald Eagle disconsolately sitting in the top of a tree staring into the shallows in the fog on the Penobscot River south of Bangor didn't turn out – too foggy.
And so it goes...
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