Wave Watching

The blizzard with the very strong east wind was supposed to start in the middle of the night, but when I woke up this morning, the snow had not started.  I was very excited, because I had checked the night before to see what the projected wave height on the beach was supposed to be today, and I really wanted to drive down to see the water in turmoil. I haven’t been wave watching for months and months,  so when I awoke to clear roads and no scheduled activities for the morning, I threw some breakfast at my kidlets, home on a break from school, and loaded the three smallest into the van in their pajamas and took off.  (YaYa elected to stay home and fold her laundry . . . I think she really just needed a break from her siblings).

The van was out of gas, so after a quick stop to refuel, we  headed downhill.  We navigated a bit of road construction to get to the beach, but when we finally arrived it was fantastic!  The wind was roaring.  The waves were gigantic, and we drove up and down the road at the rocky beach to wave watch from all sorts of different vantage points.  The air temperature was 33 degrees.  I kept the kidlets in the car because there was only one of me and I considered the fact that they might blow away.  OK, not really, but it was not exactly warm in the gusting wind.  The sustained windspeed was 45 miles per hour, gusting up to 60-65 miles per hour.  That meant that when I took the pictures, it was hard to stand up and breathe.  The spray from the waves kept covering the camera, so I had to take breaks back in the car to dry the camera off  so it would focus.

My pictures never do a big storm on Lake Superior justice.  For one thing, it’s hard to show the size of the waves.  The spray was climbing 30 feet in the air at least!  The water was just exploding onto the rocks.  The roar was wonderful.  The most important thing missing from these images from this morning is the range of colors that I just couldn’t quite capture with the camera.  (To be fair, I didn’t try to set a white balance because I could hardly stand up and take the pictures).  The water close to shore was a deep, ominous chocolate brown, and then farther out a rich seagreen, and still farther out deep, dark blue.  Best of all, the deep dark greenish blue hue of the water far away clashed with the more true dark blue of the dark, heavy clouds hanging low on the horizon, and that blue faded into lighter, brighter blue farther up into the sky.  It was stunning.  The clouds had such an interesting texture contrasted with the texture of the water.

Water.  I just become more and more enamored of what an amazing thing it is all the time.  It’s forever changing into so many different forms.  Ice:  sculpted into an infinite multitude of shapes.  Snow:  fluffy and heavy and the purest of all white.  And then water in it’s natural state, which can be still like glass, clear, or incredibly murky, shaded all sorts of colors.  It can rush, roar, and be so amazingly powerful.  Water always keeps me on my toes.

The pajama clad kidlets liked watching the waves a lot, especially Mr. TOF, and we stayed until one of them had to go to the bathroom, which was the cue to head home.  But I will not lie and say they were wonderstruck during the whole affair.  Mr. TOF was hopping mad that he didn’t have the right kind of mittens when we loaded the van, and furious that his brother’s mittens didn’t fit his hands right.  The Banana and Mr. SP pestered and argued with each other in the back seat so many times that I wanted to put on a pair of noise canceling headphones.  They did not stay in their own territory in the car when we were parked.

They sang the alphabet as loudly as they could, and then Mr. SP yelled from the backseat, “AND NOW I WILL RECITE ALL THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!  George Washington!  Abraham Lincoln!  Useless Grant!  Kevin Koolaid!”  And then they argued about whether there actually were real presidents named Useless Grant and Kevin Koolaid.

Like water, I just never quite know what to expect from those kidlets.  And just when I think I am going to loose my patience, all of my patience and it’s never going to come back, they do something astoundingly funny.