More storm pics from South Nags Head

     The weather in Nags Head has been wretched for the past couple of days but the sun made a brief appearance this morning, allowing Uncle Jack to continue his post-Ida explorations of his old neighborhood---South Nags Head, N.C.  This morning's perambulations took him to a couple of perennial trouble spots---the Comfort Inn South and its neighbors, and the Sea Gull Drive area near the 20 milepost---both of which were particularly hard hit by last week's storm..  The pictures tell the story.

The Comfort Inn South lost its walkway to the beach as well as a lot of new decking installed after other storms in recent years. There have been no cars in the parking lot all week so Uncle Jack presumes it is closed until necessary repairs can be made.

The Yachtsman Condos are two doors south of the Comfort Inn.  Owners will have to get along without their swimming pool for a while as this sign suggests.

                                          And this is the reason why.

(Top picture). The Diamond Shoals condo development next door to the Comfort Inn took its usual hit. Management wasted no time in trucking in new sand to replace at least some of what washed away last week. The swimming pool is long gone.
(Bottom).  A hotel can't get much more oceanfront than this.

Longtime readers will remember that a large house called Gray Eagle (later Kuckoo's Nest) stood in front of the house in the foreground until a couple of years ago when it was moved back across the beach road. Looks like it may be time to call the movers again. (Looking south from Seagull Drive)

All but a short stub of Seagull Drive washed away again last week.  It has been rebuilt a couple of times since Isabel but town officials will no doubt think twice before spending any more money on it given that the cottages on the right are now sitting in the water most of the time.  Are they finished as rental houses?  Don't bet on it.

                                                          High but not dry.

Post (Ida) cards from South Nags Head

        Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. took a long walk down the beach in South Nags Head yesterday from James street at about the 19 milepost to Pelican street about a mile south where they had to turn around because there was no more beach to walk on.  He took pictures along the way which suggest the enormous power unleashed by last week's storm.  Most striking was the disappearance of vast amounts of sand as shown by the "bridges to nowhere" which now hang in mid-air over what were substantial dunes before the storm.  A few small older cottages collapsed when their underpinnings gave way but the biggest problem left in the wake of  this storm is the large number of  fairly substantial buildings which now sit high and dry on the beach, well in front of what remains of the dune line, or in some cases are actually in the surf most of the time.  This is not a new problem by any means but the number of such structures is greater than ever before and presents a knotty problem  for town government.  Should they be torn down or forced to move off the public beach or should they be left in place with the hope that one day the beach will be made whole again, by God or man, and their viability for tax purposes restored?
      Look for more pictures in a day or two from other parts of  South Nags Head even harder hit than this one.

       It will take a phalanx of bulldozers a very long time to restore the sand that vanished over night from under this walkway.

                                                             And this one.

      And this one.  Most troubling is the fact that a whole winter's worth of northeasters is still to come.

           Some escaped total destruction but their days may be numbered.

     Some didn't make it.  It will take superhuman effort to get this one ready for rental again next season.

                                                Another victim.

    The widest beach in South Nags Head---former location of Surfside Drive which the town gave up trying to save a couple of years ago and allowed nature to take its course.  Pretty.

     The "High Dunes" in the background are made of sand bulldozed off the street after the storm.  Better     than no dunes at all maybe..

Tale of Two Cities

            This has been a busy week in Charm City and in Nags Head, too, from what he has seen on the internet.  It was one of those weeks when he wished he could be in two places at the same time---and he almost was, actually, through the miracle of streaming video.
             On Friday morning he was surfing the web looking for pictures and accounts of the storm on the Outer Banks when he ran across a link to a website called hurricanetrack.com which sounded promising.  He clicked on the link and shortly found himself  looking at a live, streaming video of a car driving down a street that looked vaguely familiar.  It was when the car passed the South Nags Head fire station on the right that he knew exactly where he was---driving south on Old Oregon Inlet Road---virtually---and in real time.  The driver kept up a running commentary as he drove, mentioning that he was looking for "Oregon Street" where he wanted to make a video of an oceanfront  house that had apparently collapsed in that vicinity.
             Uncle Jack waited while he parked his car on the berm and went up to the beach to make a video with his camcorder and then suffered with him for at least twenty minutes while he struggled to upload the video to a server in the clouds whence it could be viewed later by storm fans like Uncle Jack.  After a while he turned around and headed north on Old Oregon Inlet Trail, resuming live, streaming video as he went---right past Uncle Jack's house at Ciltvaira street and on up to Cahoon's store at Whalebone Junction where he turned around again and headed for Manteo.  Uncle Jack stayed with him across the causeway and onto the Virginia Dare bridge where he apparently lost connection with the Sprint satellite.
            Needless to say, this was a weird, eye-opening experience for Uncle Jack.  It wasn't quite like being there but it was unlike anything he had experienced before.  The static webcams at places like the fishing piers and the S-curves in Rodanthe are fun to look at once in a while but driving around the Outer Banks in real time is something else.  (The trip that Uncle Jack dropped in on had actually started at the northernmost part of the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk and continued south through Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head before he joined it around milepost 18).  He still knows next to nothing about hurricanetrack.com but you can be sure he has bookmarked it and he recommends that you check it out at www.hurricanetrack.com  It's a great resource.
          Meanwhile in Bawlmer the cultural scene was almost as exciting as the northeaster in Nags Head.  Thursday last featured a doubleheader in the form of a jazz concert at noon by a quintet of very talented Peabody Conservatory students followed by all-Gershwin evening with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  The latter included two of  Uncle Jack's all-time favorite compositions, the Rhapsody in Blue and the piano concerto in F, both of which swing like crazy.
         Sunday morning they paid their first visit to a remarkable Baltimore institution called "The Book Thing". It's a short walk from their condo and it consists of a large, one-story warehouse full of used books---tens of thousands of them,  all free for the taking. (Limit---1500 books per day.  Just kidding---you can take as many as you want).  The Book Thing is a non-profit labor of love for a Baltimore man who cannot stand to see books thrown away so he asks people to donate them and with the help of  volunteers he sorts and shelves them and makes them available to all comers on Saturdays and Sundays.  Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. between them took home a dozen excellent books to put on their new secondhand bookshelf (pictured above) and they will surely be going back for more (as well as donating).
        Sunday afternoon they attended a free concert by the Pavel Haas Quartet from Romania at the Baltimore Museum of Art and yesterday Uncle Jack took the Mini in for its 70,000 mile required maintenance which should ensure a trouble-free trip to Nags Head on Saturday, four days hence, where they will spend Thanksgiving Week walking the beach, or what is left of it, in South Nags Head.  Check in again in about a week when Uncle Jack will blog again.

P.S.  They picked up the handsome mahogany bookshelf at a going-out-of-business store on "Antique Row".   They can now brag that their bookshelf is bigger than their TV (but not by much).
        
        
      

Soul Mates

       "Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.
       Little ones to him belong; they are weak but he is strong."

       Uncle Jack must have been about three years old when he learned that song, along with a lot of others touting the benefits of the Christian faith, in Sunday School at Nidaros Lutheran Church in Ashland, Wisconsin. Later, under the tutelage of the Reverend John A Houkum (pronounced hokum to Uncle Jack's everlasting delight) he memorized enough of the Nicene Creed to be admitted to membership in the Lutheran Church of America, Missouri Synod. (To this day he doesn't know why the Lutheran Church of America was split up into competing synods, or why there were five Lutheran churches in his home town, none of which could muster a congregation large enough to support a full-time minister).
      The Nicene Creed concludes with the words "We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come" and there is no doubt in Uncle Jack's mind that at the age of twelve or thereabouts when he pledged allegiance to the Lutheran Church he probably believed it, although he doubts that he gave it much thought at the time,  In that respect he is probably similar to all children who have been indoctrinated with one set of beliefs or another long before they are able to think for themselves.
      Somewhere along the way, probably at the den of heretics known as the University of Wisconsin, he began to doubt much of what he had been taught in Sunday School. For example, how could it possibly be true that the world was created in seven days as the bible tells us when the geological record proves beyond reasonable doubt that the earth has been around for millions of years?  In his first anthropology course he learned a little about the astonishing variety of religious belief professed by various groups of people around the world which led him further to question the sanctity of Christianity as the one and only route to "salvation",   In due time he began to wonder about the whole notion of an afterlife which, the more he learned about biology and physics, seemed exceedingly unlikely even as he grew closer to the moment in his life when he might acquire some definitive information about it.
      Anyway you can blame Mencken for this foray into elementary metaphysics.  What set it off was this passage from "Minority Report", a collection of his writings published posthumously (if only he could come back!) in 1956.

     The fact that the pious Christian believes he will live forever is no proof that he will, though it is frequently cited as one.  Even if all men believed it it would still not be true---and perhaps for that reason alone.  All its persistence proves is that the majority of men are unable to grasp the concept of annihilation.  They grasp readily enough the idea of being unconscious  for a short time, but they are quite unable  to think of being unconscious forever.

     The more Uncle Jack thinks about the Christian concepts of  afterlife, i.e. Heaven and Hell,  the more he thinks that a very long nap might be just the ticket.

                                                   "Smart" parking in Mount Vernon

          Catching rays on "The Beach" at Johns Hopkins U. on a sunny Sunday afternoon in November.                       Further evidence of global warming.

                                                                   Go Hops!!

                                        Tree in front of a knitting shop in Hampden all ready for winter.
  
  

 

Mencken on Man

           The World Serious is over and  pro basketball has thus far failed to ignite Uncle Jack's interest so he finds himself with plenty of time for more cerebral pursuits like exploring the acerbic works of the Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken.  This is in no way a chore inasmuch as he finds reading Mencken at least as much fun as watching LeBron James.  Sometimes he does both at the same time and can hardly contain himself. He  has been aided and abetted in his travels through Menckeniana by Mrs. U. J. who has a knack for locating choice out-of-print tomes and surprising him with them.  Most recently she found a copy of  Prejudices, Third Series, published by Alfred A. Knopf  in 1922, whence the following is excerpted:


All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man.  As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient machine.  He has the worst kidneys known to comparative zoology, and the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it is called upon to do, is less efficient the the eye of an earthworm. an optical instrument maker who made an instrument so clumsy would be mobbed by his customers.  Alone of all animals, terrestrial, celestial or marine, man is unfit by nature to go abroad in the world he inhabits.  He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself, armor himself.  He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without a shell,  a dog without hair, a fish without fins.  Lacking his heavy and cumbersome trappings, he is defenseless even against flies.  As God made him he hasn't even a tail to switch them off.  


      More to come next time.

Lights, Camera, Action!

     As Uncle Jack has often said, there is never a dull moment in Bawlmer.  This week he and Mrs. U.J. have found themselves in the middle of a movie set---or more correctly---looking down on a movie set from their seventh floor balcony.  A movie production company from Hollywood has been on the Johns Hopkins campus this week filming location scenes for a new movie, as yet unnamed, about the origins of the popular internet phenomenon called Facebook.  A couple of nights ago they set up their lights and reflectors and cameras almost directly under Uncle Jack's condo and spent the next several hours shooting what appeared to be the same scene over and over and over again until they finally got it right.  It was interesting to watch for a while but then it became tedious.  Very tedious.  Movie-making is not always thrilling from the looks of it.
       Johns Hopkins is actually standing in for Harvard in this epic, much to the dismay of many students who felt that the administration should not have sold out to Hollywood just to make a few bucks.  Classy Harvard, with its zillion dollar endowment, would never stoop to allow a movie to be made in its hallowed precincts for any amount of money.  Facebook was actually dreamed up by a Harvard student who, when he cashes in on his invention, will be able to buy his own university if he is so inclined.
    Uncle Jack no longer remembers why he has a Facebook page but he does and he checks in on it once in a while just to see if anything interesting has turned up.  So far he is utterly baffled as to why it has become such a fabulous success on the internet. Google he can understand.  Facebook is a mystery.
      He and Mrs. U.J. returned to the historic neighborhood of Mt. Vernon on their way to a concert at the Peabody Conservatory one day this week.  They missed several streets on an earlier excursion, pictures of which appear below.

 This trio of triangular buildings at the corner of Madison and Tyson streets caught their eye, especially the tiny one in the middle. Early 19th century builders didn't let any space go to waste.

Tyson Street is one of the hidden treasures of Baltimore.  It's only a couple of blocks long but consists almost entirely of late 18th and early 19th century houses, all impeccably restored and extremely charming.

                                      More Tyson Street houses.

                   And still more---one of which is for sale, probably for a pretty penny.

                Yet another triangular house. The interiors must present challenges for the occupants.

This elegant old hotel on Tyson, once the residence of Wallis Warfield Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, is being rehabbed into what the developers claim will become the most prestigious hotel in all of Charm City when it opens next spring.

Eubie Blake, composer of the Charleston Rag and I'm Just Wild About Harry and jazz pianist extraordinaire was a native of Baltimore.  This museum in Mt. Vernon is high on Uncle Jack's list of places to visit soon.  It was closed on this occasion.

This was the scene of the filming as seen from Uncle Jack's balcony.  No sign of it remained the next morning.

Mencken on Capitalism

     What we confront is not the failure of capitalism, but simply the failure of democracy.  Capitalism has really been responsible for all the progress of the modern age.  Better than any other system ever devised, it provides leisure for large numbers of superior men, and so fosters the arts and sciences. No other system ever heard of is so beneficial to invention.  Its fundamental desire for gain may be far from glorious per se, but it at least furthers improvement in all the departments of life.  We owe to it every innovation that makes life secure and comfortable.
     Unfortunately, like any other human institution (for example Holy Church), capitalism tends to run amuck when it is not restrained, and democracy provides inadequate means of keeping it in order. There is never any surety that democracy will throw up leaders competent to discern the true dangers of capitalism and able to remedy them in a prudent and rational manner.  Thus we have vacillated between letting it run wild and trying to ruin it.  Both courses are hazardous and ineffective, and it is hard to say which is more so.


      Thus sayeth H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, in "Minority Report",  a collection of his notebooks published shortly after his death in 1956. How Uncle Jack wishes Mencken was still with us and commenting in his inimitable fashion on the events of the day, especially in the realm of capitalism and its discontents.  What would he have to say, he wonders, about the likes of  Geithner, Bernanke, Summers, and Obama who are struggling to contain the disaster perpetrated by the latest group of capitalists to "run amuck"?  What language would he use to excoriate the greedy Wall Street bankers who have brought us to this parlous state?  It would be fun to read the Baltimore Sun again, that's for sure.