Hurricane watch and Liska's storm

A beautiful morning, the Spanish moss almost motionless.  A great blue heron flaps off the bulkhead. Cicadas chant, an osprey chirps peevishly overhead, and dragonflies and hummingbirds zip back and forth through the humid air. The creek is flat and still, except on the edge of the far bank, where there's a muddle of feeding fish making bubbles, like blowing through a straw into Coca-cola.

I saw these small fish when I was out in the kayak the other day.  Not sure what they are.  A school of them skims along, visible only by their helmet-like foreheads, dark eyes, and little pink mouths cupping the water's surface. Flurrying toward me, agape, they brought to mind the piranhas of old spy movies. Devouring flesh of victims in seconds! Leaving only scoured bones! In a word: creepy. But when this cluster of voracious grazers noticed the yellow kayak in their path--if fish can be said to "notice"--they nosedived as one--floop!--and disappeared.  If they reminded me of hungry piranhas, my boat probably reminded them of a hungry walleye.

Meanwhile, a hurricane is bearing down on all of us creatures here in sunny New Bern. This according to NOAA and The Weather Channel and New Bern's iconic Skip Waters, Chief Meteorologist for WCTI.  Otherwise, you'd never suspect the risk of an exponentially more chaotic version of the fish plowing and roiling the placid creek.

Waiting for the gale on a windless day reminded me that our grandmother lived through the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900.  The city was virtually leveled.

In those days, there were no warnings from StormTrack12 HD Live Doppler. In addition, the Local Forecast Official at the time recalled that "the usual signs which herald the approach of hurricanes were not present in this case."  The morning before that stupendous storm, people went about their business as usual, maybe even enjoying the beach. But in the middle of the night, the official reported "unusually heavy swells from the southeast, intervals of one to five minutes, overflowing low places south portion of city three to four blocks from beach. Such high water with opposing winds never observed previously." 

In thinking about calms-before-the-storms, then as well as now, I Googled my maternal great-grandfather's last name, and found a treasure.  My grandmother's sister, Sarah Helen Littlejohn, at age 8 wrote an account of her family's experience in this bygone horrific hurricane. You can read the actual handwritten manuscript on-line:  "My Experiences in the Galveston Storm."  Six pages or so in, there is my grandmother's (unusual) name, Liska: "My youngest sister Liska sat on a little chair with her head bent on a pillow."

My sister Kathy called today from Ohio to find out about our pre-storm preparations. I mentioned my discovery of Sarah Helen's document as preserved on the web. Eerily, she said that just a few days ago, she too had made the same discovery, also doing a search for E. G. Littlejohn after a conversation about hurricanes.

My forebears survived the storm, although an estimated 8,000 other Galveston residents did not. 

Galveston after the 1900 hurricane.

Over a century later, my friend Maureen happened to make a career move from New England to Galveston. I visited her once, but didn't look up my great-grandfather's former address. I believe the house still stands, though. (Maureen endured Hurricane Ike in 2008. After overcoming incredible obstacles to restore her ruined home and to reconfigure her professional life again, she moved away, to inland California.)

New Bern isn't coastal.  Its location, flanked by rivers and sounds, is referred to as the Inner Banks, mostly by realtors attempting to cash in on Outer Banks cachet. So we are unlikely to experience anything as catastrophic as Liska's storm. But it's strange to me that on this quiet morning, where even the creek seems to be holding its breath, the whispers from her girlhood blew in.