The Magnolias Of Philadelphia

When I was first learning about various trees of the continent back in my idealistic youth, I was blessed to come across a free copy of Audubon's Field Guide to North American Trees (Eastern Region).  This was a marvelous book full of fun things like maps, pictures, and even illustrations of trees in silhouette, with the evergreens being nice and full, and the deciduous trees shown in their bare winter glory.  Now and then, I came across a remarkable leafy tree... with leaves on it!  I knew about them before, of course, being a traveled veteran of Southern Florida, but what really impressed me was the fact that some of them could be found very north, namely the American Holly (Ilex Opaca) and above all else, the majestic Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora).  In specific, the guide noted that the beauty is noted for hardiness "north to Philadelphia".

In gardening circles, people are lately growing fonder of the art of "zone pushing", which is to say that they, ahem, we, like to grow things far north of where they are considered hardy.  Gardeners in Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, and Cleveland (and associated friendly cities) have long since considered anything that retains leaves in the winter to be of high prestige and a reminder that life goes on during otherwise snowy and cold dark months between November and March.  Alright, so October and April...  Anyway, its a hard thing to take even a cold hardy palm or broadleaved evergreen and expect it to dance for you while the blizzard rages, at least this far inland.  Philadelphia, on the other hand, is perhaps in one of the perfect situations for attending to a variety of cultivation.

While it has far more in common with the ocean than the Appalachians, it has elements of both; pine species form extensive barrens in nearby rural areas in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as more mountain species like rhododendrons in surviving woodlands.  It's not too hot, it's not too cold, and due to an atmosphere of tolerance, it was the American city that got the most brains to boot.  Massachusetts was all about religious agenda/freedom, New York was all about commerce, Charleston and Williamsburg were all about slave-powered farming, but Philadelphia was about letting you pray how you wanted, letting you argue with people over politics, and, surprisingly, letting you talk about what academic subjects were currently in vogue.  Alexander Hamilton of the spice islands by way of New York tried to get finance to set up a crown here too, but ultimately the city is still best remembered as more of a home to the Benjamin Franklin type.  This is a city of books, trees, and people who still like to read newspapers on a park bench.

One such popular academic interest was plants.  Aristocrats in Europe went crazy over trying to acquire New World vegetation for their estates, especially in England.  Various botanists made quite the name for themselves detecting and acquiring such treasures, and Philadelphia's own John Bartram earned the respectable but low paying title of the "King's botanist".  While Charleston, under Michaux, served as a secondary port for the thriving plant and seed trade, the varieties of climate and plant life meeting here, as well as the royal connection, ensured that Philadelphia would remain the chief point of departure for the finest trees finding their way to the finest clients.  Unlike Charleston, however, Philadelphia grew up much more snug and dense, seemingly paved over, much to the distaste of the founders and succeeding generations of planners in the city who wanted everyone to have a growing space.  Thomas Jefferson disliked the environment, and like many other politicians, wanted to try to escape to greener pastures when possible, which usually meant taking a trip to Bartram's house (which I regret upon regret not stopping at).  There they talked about plants.  No, really.  Jefferson and Washington were plant geeks.

Philadelphia has since greened rather nicely, even if the concrete which has replaced the brick is still the dominant feature everywhere.  The riverbanks are lush, there are parks and green spaces never far away, and the city is home to the United States' first urban national wildlife refuge.  Out of all this, however, what caught my eye was, well, the magnolias.  My little guide book did not disappoint.  I can't remember where half of them were taken at, with the exception of the line of tall ones at Betsy Ross House.  They are not hard to find, though.  Just wander through the historic core and you will find quite a few, some very impressive in size.

Yeah, that's a Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) intruding on the top left.  Pretty cool seeing them together!

These last fellows were at the Betsy Ross House.

There is also a garden consisting almost entirely of imported magnolias which, while not the majestic Southern Magnolia, do put on quite the show in spring.  I ran into some volunteers at the garden who gave me the unofficial history of magnolias in the city, as well as the intent behind the creators of this garden.  They explained that Washington, plant geek, wanted to green up the city he had to spend so much time in as president.  He was particularly fond of magnolias, which the ladies and I deduced to probably be his proud Southern Magnolias, arboreal symbols of American robustness.  As a symbolic tree, Magnolia Grandiflora is much more associated with the deeper South and with Andrew Jackson, who planted them at the White House as they were his wife's favorite tree.  Nevertheless, Washington probably would have run into plenty of them in his boyhood tidewater stomping grounds, as the tree was already making quite the impression in the trans-Atlantic trade and was already being cultivated as an ornamental in the southern lowcountry.  He probably enjoyed seeing a tree as robust as this in remaining green even in colder winters, and as a horticulturalist probably thought about bringing them further north with him into his presidential exile from Mt. Vernon.  The creators of the garden, acting 150 years later, apparently did not have the same design in mind, which the volunteers and I grumbled about.  The Asiatic magnolias, they said, are nice, but they only flower in the spring, and, well, are not very American.  At the risk of sounding like an ecological imperialist, considering the intent of the design of the garden, I have to agree.

Still, it's a nice garden (with a fountain, which I did not take a picture of), a quiet space of reflection surrounded by quiet streets (Locust between 4th and 5th streets) and various quiet places of worship.  There are thirteen flowering trees and shrubs which represent the thirteen colonies, but most of them are imports, and ironically, two of the species are iconic of England!  I'm a proud subject of the Commonwealth myself, but the concept seemed rather nutty to me.  If I had to guess, I would think that the creators wanted to put on an incredible burst of spring and early summer color, and to be fair, the garden was set up long after the colonial era passion for natives had faded and the Victorian and Imperial passion for exotics had become the rage.  Remember what I said about zone-pushing?  That's something fairly new, the current emerging vogue.  People maybe just weren't planting southern trees here back in the day, just as they weren't planting palms in Vancouver or London until fairly recently.

The worm has since turned, and the National Park Service tends toward at least the homegrown and preferably native ecological restoration as much as possible (and to be fair, as much as they work here and are not too distantly native, Magnolia Grandiflora is native no further north than the central Chesapeake, if I am allowed to make such a bold statement).  In the garden we get to see shifting trends in horticulture presented as a history lesson about a history lesson.  I have to admit, regardless of my angst, I stopped and enjoyed the patch of green for a while.  Washington probably would have done the same.  Jefferson would have turned cross, purchased nearby land, and started over on a superior garden.  Bartram would have sold him the plants.  All of them probably would have been in awe of the many Southern Magnolias found through the rest of the city.  I have to admit, seeing them together with so many other trees, including my favorite Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) gave the city a pretty interesting arboreal landscape.  You can do that in DC too, but then you have to pay for it with hot, muggy summers that do not get nearly as bad here.

What's the rest of that city treescape look like?  Come on by next post for a tour. 

Real Maple Syrup: Part Two

Moving along in our discovery of one of the most amazing native things ever produced from the continent, maple syrup, we must question why some syrups are naturally superior than others, and the answer lies in something similar to what makes wines different from one another: Terroir.

Terroir is a mystical, magical concept.  Like many French words, it has no powerful English equivalent with which to express its full meaning, but basically it comes down to all the things that make a plant do what a plant does best: react to its environment.  This includes weather and climate, soil, etc.  In the case of Vitis Vinifera, a.k.a. the wine grape, things are obviously extremely complex due to human intervention in cultivating numerous forms down through centuries of loving manipulation.  Various species of maple (and by extension, other possible syrup friendly trees), in contrast, at least our North American trees, have not nearly been selectively bred to the same extent that wine grapes have.  That said, we do have a small assortment of species to choose from in the syrup game, and also said, we find that nature is remarkable in that has long produced variations within species without our help.  In part, this is because terroir has affected our leafy friends in such a way that trees are likely to have some small variations in form and resulting taste even when sampled from neighboring areas.  A Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) from central Tennessee would find itself facing a rather brutal winter if it were to find itself suddenly in Quebec, to say nothing of what the same shock would be like for a Red Maple (Acer Rubrum), a far more generally adaptable species, suddenly finding itself no longer in the swamps of Southern Florida but among the shorelines of the Ottawa River.

This sort of stuff gets commercial tree growers in trouble quite a bit, especially where more tender temperate ornamental trees like the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis) are concerned.  One of the most obvious differences in terroir felt by a nursery grown tree from the South and imported into Le Nord would be the new and strange frigid winter that the tree would find itself trying to be hardy to.  Likewise, the tree would find that Le Nord is not nearly as hot in the summer as it was back South, to say nothing of how much less humid and rainy!  Finally, it would also find that the soil was so very, very different from what it grew up in.  I could go on and on about terroir, or Phytogeography, which is pretty much what the core of this blog is about, but...

The maples!

Most maples are creatures of the forest, and thus are very fond of mixed-light conditions and moisture, moisture, and more moisture.  With the exception of the aloof, adaptable, and mysterious Box Elder (Acer Negundo), none of our temperate eastern maples are courageous enough to venture far into the drier prairie lands, and the Red Maple will not even make it very far into the eastern prairies of Illinois or Indiana, being completely afraid to face the possibility of drought combined with fire, which is another reason why I probably found even the thought of central Illinois syrup to be funny (to be fair, Sugar Maples and Black Maples are apparently made of tougher stuff and can indeed be found in forested patches there).  Sure, the maples can be planted further afield from their comfortable natural ranges, but they might not produce enough starch in their roots to make syrup production viable.  Syrup production in most places was not the best in the March of 2013, owing to the colossal hot, drought-heavy summer that was 2012.  The brunt of that disaster was felt in the True Midwest, but trees were sufficiently stressed in all but northern New England.  Rocky, sandy, well-drained northern Ontario and neighboring western Quebec and northern Michigan baked and dried to a crisp.  Massive forest fires made life even more difficult.

That year, Vermont won the award.

Thankfully, most of the time the inland north does better.  Why?  A little thing called maritime, or oceanic influence.

The most powerful maritime climates in the world are usually envisioned as being temperate western Europe, the Pacific Northwest, etc., but a typical cold January day even in chilly Nova Scotia is decidedly more moderate of a chill than one would find farther inland, even New Brunswick and Maine. Champlain and friends discovered this first hand when their colony of Saint Croix was established in a very chilly position, and soon made way to the other side of the Bay of Fundy where they established the roots of future Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia.  Saint Croix was on the "inland" side of the bay, gaining no benefit from the prevailing westerlies which would skim the mostly unfrozen waters, pick up moisture, and moderate the winter chill.  Still, even Saint Croix is much more mild than places further inland, such as the St. Lawrence valley.  The ocean, westerlies or not, is like a giant road block for intense continental chill.  New England, as a result, is a tropical paradise compared to neighboring Quebec and upstate New York.

That said, the same can be noted for upstate New York in comparison to Michigan and southern Ontario, and then Michigan in comparison to Wisconsin.  The Great Lakes, you see, have a small amount of maritime influence of their own.

Public domain, see the original at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041130.html.

The above picture features a north western wind, but the overall effect remains the same: downwind of the lakes one gets moderated temperatures and a ton of moisture.  In the summer, this sometimes has a reverse effect of creating something like a coastal California marine layer, wherein the water and shoreline areas are under heavy cloud while inland the place is delightfully sunny.  In any event, even smaller bodies of water can influence climate, with an unfrozen Lake St. Clair providing small scale changes to the local climate.  The larger lakes, though, are truly things of raw climactic power.  Superior creates its own weather systems!  Well, she does until she manages to largely freeze over.  The lake effect runs to a screeching halt once the bodies get a coat of ice.  A total coat is rare for all but Erie, but enough of the surface area gets frozen in places like Georgian Bay, western Superior, and the Straits of Mackinac, that winter does come and the true maritime influence disappears.  The result for the local terroir in places like northern Michigan, the Adirondacks, and the Opeongo Hills section (Algonquin highlands) of the Laurentian Mountains is the best of both worlds; New England meets Boreal.

Like in the deserts of the western United States and Canada and northern Mexico, elevation rise is the second factor in enhancing this climate soup.  As air rises on the Porcupine, Adirondack, or Laurentian mountains or onto the Mio Plateau, all of which are significant rises above the surrounding lowlands (a change of at least a thousand feet in many places), it cools if even ever so slightly, and dumps out moisture.  In each of these locations, a slight rain-shadow is even created.  The most noticeable of these is in the central Ottawa valley of Ontario, where Jack-Pine savannas and cacti can be found.  Like in the desert sky-islands out west, the Opeongo portion of the Laurentian mountains contrast this scenery with moist spruce-hardwood forests, replete with maritime expectations like Red Spruce (Picea Rubens) and Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis), well west of their happy Appalachian strongholds.  Then of course there are the maples, benefiting both from the same moisture, and the final ingredient of terroir: recycled life and powerful organic soil (and on the Mio plateau and in the Laurentians, glacially deposited sand an loam to assist in drainage).  Powerful for trees, anyway.  Farming never took off in any of these mountain lands, confined instead to nearby clay belts in the surrounding lowlands.  The end result is a logging paradise, and more so, a maple syrup dream, the moisture of the Appalachians with the winters of the interior (sorry Vermont, you are just close enough to oceanic protection to make the slight difference for the pickiest syrup-enthusiast), perfect for feeding a tree and then keeping the food locked away from pesky winter thaws.  When that sap starts to run, it really runs.

In review, the best sort of syrup (and remember, that local soil can make you even pickier) comes from here:

And yes, x does indeed mark the spot of syrup in its Platonic form, but that is just my opinion regarding the finest terroir.  What can I say?  Those Canadian Shield minerals are just amazing.  Next post, we will start looking at individual trees, and we will cap off with individual products.  And before I get any letter-bombs sent to me from the Green Mountain state, Vermont syrup is fine.  Honest. 

A Change Of Pace

Over a month ago I pledged a return to regular posting on American Voyages.  I wanted to share with my readers some thoughts on what direction the politics and culture of the continent were headed in, mostly spurred on by a flurry of political commentary from all fronts in the wake of the United States Federal government shutdown.  Then, now, and as I hopefully will remain true to form for, I was and am for keeping this blog free of too much current political commentary.  Why?  Democracy has enough angry voices out there already!  All joking aside, however, in general I try to view current events in light of a broader historical lens.  This is probably due to several factors, notably an academic background in the humanities.  Yes, a philosophy student can direct all possible energy to making bold statements about post-modernism or attempt to disprove everything that came before said student, but my own intellectual journey has found an exploration of the past, with an examination of the organic development of humanity, to be far more helpful in coming to thoughts about things in general. 

That's what I had been trying to accomplish in coming to a statement about where language and the political culture surrounding language have come to.  Why?  The why is simple.  People these days fight about everything from minimum wage to military spending (and yes, most of it revolves around money), but the thing that seems to get people, even people who could care less about all the other issues out there, very riled up.  I say this because time and again I see a mother in a grocery store talking to her kids in Spanish, or some men working together again talking in that apparently taboo language, and nearby listeners almost fly into a red hot rage over the issue!  "Speak English!"  "This is America!"  Then of course, the party in target usually apologizes, in English no less, and moves on, to no avail.  Heck, Spanish is nothing, you should see the reactions I get to when I mumble to myself about how expensive gas is, en Francais, here (or even worse, in some heavily Anglo-centric place in Ontario).  A personal mumble, barely audible to most people, is tantamount to treason for some people.

Needless to say, this tends to make me irate.  Now, while I have every intention of continuing a historical overview of the history of how we came to this place linguistically on this continent, I might as well come out and say it for all those who were wondering:  Half of this country was speaking Spanish before 1848 and a Mexican presence everywhere from California to Kansas evolved on this soil at about the same time an English-American one did (to say nothing of how many native tongues were around).  For that matter, most of the people who get mad at the "Spanish threat" are buying into an old cultural imperialism despite the fact that their ancestors were probably considered second class to anything even remotely resembling a northern European, if the standards consider even other Germanic languages to be on the same level as beloved English.  There.  I said it.  Now let me say this.  English is not going anywhere.  People around the world consider fluency in it to be desirable or at least profitable (believe it or not, especially in Latin America).  English really is an amazing language with an incredible literary history.  I say this as a person of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian heritage. 

So why put off the history posts?  They take a lot out of me.  I can rant on easily like I did tonight, but I want American Voyages to be a place of learning, not diatribe.  When I write these posts, I like them to be informed, and trust me, the next few posts in this series enter a period of remarkably complex history.  Here we will see French make a thrust to the Canadian shores of the Pacific, Spanish encounter the United States again now in the friendly territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and native tongues get diminished everywhere.  We get to see English change into so many regional variations in both countries, and we have a lot of fact checking to do.  Each and every post, if I try to do it well, takes a lot out of me. 

And let's face it, you all really come here just for the nature photography, right?  Well, maybe not.  It has been a while since I talked about the primary focus of this blog though: the land around us, and not just where the people have gone on it.  The statistics indicate that A.V. has been opened to a much broader reader base even on an hourly basis, probably thanks to social media advertising, but also thanks to botanical and historical organizations out there.  I need to get this thing hopping again, and the heavy posts are going to have to take a backseat until we can get things up and running.  I want to share our wonderful corner of the world, after all, with the world.  In particular I would like to thank The Hardy Palm International journal, based in Vancouver, of taking note not of my diatribes, but of my coverage of fun things like trees growing where they ought not.  Wait a minute, palms, that sounds wonderful, let's go there next.

Are We Headed To A New Civil War?

North Americans, yes, even us comparatively politically and socially sedate Canadians and Mexicans, are an opinionated lot.  Sure, there are active ideological fronts being fought over in the rest of the world, but here we seem to have built up a culture that thrives on, or perhaps even requires, ideological diversity.  Even in some of Europe's more open societies which rely on total democratic participation to exist as they do, North Americans trump them in terms of respecting the notion of personal determination to the point of it being made into a sort of religion of liberty.  Canada and the United States largely inherited this passion for mother Britain, which in the eighteenth century was every bit as crazy over liberty than the colonies were.  The frontier mentality of rugged individualism, in fact, can largely be traced to the freedom-oriented folkways of the people of the northern borderlands between England and Scotland.  That said, such passions were later transformed by an influx of a wide diversity of immigrants, both free and enslaved, from across Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.  Down in Mexico, a reaction against a distant or otherwise oppressive Spain grew in intensity inspired by what was happening further north.

The history lesson from there on is an important one.  Whereas Britain buckled down in defending a particular concept of freedom, particularly the national identity brand, against intrusions by France and eventually Germany, North America exploded into hundreds of different camps.  In Mexico and Canada, this has always been strongly evidenced by strong provincial/regional traits; the near revolutions in Chiapas and Quebec that have never really faded away are proof enough of this without even looking at the rest of how the countries are at odds with the capitals.  In the United States, however, while the federal government remains strong and appears to be an emblem of power and unity to the rest of the world, well...

Let's just remind ourselves that the thirteen colonies almost did not rebel together, much less stick together once the final shots had been fired at Yorktown.  The backcountry was at odds with the lowcountry, both of which were at odds with the valley inhabitants of the Delaware, Hudson, and so many other watersheds, who were further at odds with the struggling remnants of Puritan power in New England, who were at odds with... you get the picture.  Or maybe not.  You see, especially in the frontier regions, regionalism was the furthest thing from the minds of towns and even just families, clans really, that preferred a lack of contact if not outright war with the neighbors.  The only thing that kept a Virginian mountaineer unarmed in the same room with a Virginian planter, to say nothing of a Bostonian merchant, would be a common threat.  The firstborn, with their ferocity in combat and every bit as strong desire to preserve home security, were the first cause of unity.  Then came their allies the French, either from across the ocean or closer to home among Les Habitants.  Both were largely dealt with in 1763.  In the decades to follow, that new threat would be mother Britain, and finally in 1812, that same mother and her new child and sister to the colonies, Canada, would be the source of final movement into a cohesive national sentiment.  Note though, the term there, for sentiment is not to be confused with identity. 

There were still identities a plenty even within the individual states.  This is how Virginia, a behemoth stretching from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the Ohio valley, eventually became broken into smaller entities, starting most vividly with the memory of the creation of Kentucky in 1797, itself an improbable geographic collage of mountains, savannas, forests, and even cypress swamps.  Yes, such a buffet of both mentality and environment combined into the rugged individualism that continues to define divides with American society.  Most people know that the West is not the Plains is not the South is not the Rustbelt is not the East Coast, but they don't know how fragmented national identity is beyond such simple distinctions.  People with the regions certainly do; no Charlestonian would ever be confused with someone from Memphis.  No "Yooper" would ever be confused with someone from metro Detroit, at least by someone in Michigan.  Buffalo feels like it is at the other end of the world from New York City, if New Yorkers even take the time to recognize that there is also a state called New York (I joke only slightly).

This is now.  How about back, say, during the Civil War?

Artillery at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.  This gun is in Kentucky, pointed toward both Virginia and Tennessee.  The Gap never saw significant military action, but changed hands many times.  I put this photo here as a reminder that that war was very pervasive, with reminders of armed conflict surrounding nearly all of even the backcountry population.

The sides of the war are usually broken simply into North and South, with the North being pictured as a heavily urbanized industrial bastion of truth fighting against slavery and the South being painted as an agrarian civilization vainly struggling to hold on to slavery.  Military historians often focus on the main events in the Tennessee and Mississippi valleys and the front centered around Virginia.  The truth is, decently-sized battles were fought as far west as New Mexico and as far north as Indiana, and in an age when much of the population, especially in rural fronts, had access to a firearm, little skirmishes across towns were a lot more common than historical memory permits recollection for.  Recent works of fiction like Gangs of New York have managed to revive interest in the back door of the war, but common imagination likes to view the early 1860's as a brief interruption in an otherwise strong national expansion and development.  The truth is, we were all at each others throats half the time, over issues like race, class, the economy, religion, the environment, immigration, language, etc.  Sound familiar?

It should.  We never really stopped fighting, because we are all so damn passionate about these issues.  We had a series of crises, from the two world wars and a rather brutal depression, to bolster the strength of federal versus local identity, but the security, prosperity, and romanticizing of historical memory that came afterwards helped us forget about some things.  Indeed, again, we never really stopped fighting even during the outbreak of peace.

Even people who claim to hate politics and loathe taking sides feel strongly about such issues here, and given the chance to get irritated over at least one of them, will try to weigh in on how they really feel, even if they don't exactly pick up a gun and fire into the air over it.  One such issue is language, which after a delay of nearly two years in running this blog, I think I will finally just bite into and discuss next post.

But in the meantime, how about that title question up there?

Things are getting ugly, and the last lingering stabilization provided for by the Second World War might finally be fading from national consciousness.  Some serious questions are once again being asked, people are either arming themselves with guns or democratic participation in increasing numbers, and, surprisingly and ironically, camps are being formed to make the claim about who is the most American of them all!

Yes, gay and confederate.  Talk about a diversity of camps.  This was taken in a town which I will not call by name, for potential fear of some bizarre form of reprisal, in North Carolina. 

This answer is, we probably are heading to something major that is going to bring about large scale changes to our society, and in a country with a history defined so much by war, armed conflict is certainly not out of the question.  In the coming weeks, let's explore why and what this means together, and as always, through the lens of history and geography.

GAAHHH! TORNADO!

Two years ago I was passing through Joplin, Missouri.  Only a month had passed since the town was almost entirely destroyed by an F-5 tornado.  Like most people everywhere else, I was nothing but full of sympathy for what had happened to the people there, but like most people, I also let the event slip into the back of my mind as the weeks went on.  I was very sharply reminded about what had happened; most hotels in the area were either closed, packed full of relief workers and displaced locals, or no longer standing.  What had seemed like a convenient stopping place for the night on a long trip from California to Michigan turned into a reminder that we live on a continent that is very, very naturally destructive.  Overhead information signs directed a ton of relief workers into action, with an entire exit off of I-44 dedicated just to outside assistance entering what was left of the city.  I took no pictures of what little could be seen from the interstate, which was horrific.  Trees, buildings, everything... flattened. 

So how does the sort of thing happen, how did people in the past deal with it, what should we do about it, etc?  I figured I would wait to post anything about tornadoes until the media hysteria had died down regarding the recent Oklahoma disasters, but seeing as how I just encountered a weak tornado of my own a few days ago, now seemed to be as good a time as any.  Tornadoes, more than most natural disasters, seem to make people rubber-neck and dive into as much information on the matter as possible.  The press, therefore, jump all over the tragedies involved as fast as they can and a lot of rapid speech and decrying of the fury of nature runs out of the mouths of many a reporter.  For the most part, though, they get their facts straight. 

Tornadoes are the result of colliding air masses within a larger storm system causing a bunch of air to rapidly rotate.  The winds that result within really powerful tornadoes, such as the one which hit Joplin, are among the most powerful winds on our planet, making hurricanes seem mild in comparison.  Hurricanes, in fact, can spawn multiple tornadoes within them, something which happens often in the Carolinas and Georgia when the storms make landfall there.  While one imagines a tornado to suck everything out of existence, its damaging effects are actually the result of the rotating winds knocking around debris which can include entire houses, trees, and trucks.  Nevertheless, as I can confirm from personal experience, one does feel as if one is being sucked off the ground into the blue, or rather gray and lightning illuminated yonder. 

(Before anyone asks, this happened on I-80, at the only tollbooths in Illinois for I-80.  The car I was in was lifted a few feet off the ground before it was thankfully plunked back down just a foot or so in front of where it lifted off.  Yes, I thought I was going to die.  I have also been within a few hundred feet of an F-5 tornado at the corner of where Nebraska and Colorado meet near Ogallala, Nebraska, and more recently a small rope tornado near Whitmore Lake, Michigan.) 

So why do they happen so often here?  You know that bit about air masses doing a dance?  It just so happens that North America is one of the most chaotic battlegrounds for air masses coming in contact with one another.  In the north we have Hudson Bay, which together with our large continental mass (oceans tend to moderate temperatures, dry land tends to let them go nuts in one direction or another) extends cold air masses much closer to the equator than anywhere else on earth.  Frosts have been reported as far south as Tampico, Mexico, clearly in the tropics.  During the last ice age, the frigid Hudson kept pumping out glacial masses of ice that extended closer to the equator than any other non-alpine location on the planet.  In the other corner, the Gulf of Mexico is a heat and humidity factory wherein the great global ocean thermal conveyer belt (say that five times fast) suddenly turns from deep and cold to shallow and hot.  It produces the Gulf Stream which tends to make Europe a pleasant place in terms of temperature moderation.  It also gives the eastern part of our continent our amazing forests and plentiful water.  It also gives us summer days where we can practically watch the paint peel off of the walls because everything is so damn sticky. 

Now, put the two of these together and we get amazing storms.  Make the already very different layers of the atmosphere dance with even greater surface extremes between those larger air masses and we get our destructive tornadoes.  Sure, they get them in Europe now and then, they get them in China (where they have a scaled down version of our hot-cold fight between Siberia and the South China Sea), they get them in the tropics, and they even get them on top of mountains, but nowhere near the intensity and frequency with which they happen in central North America.  Oklahoma is the worst place to be for this sort of thing.  A small part of the state's southeastern corner has a climate and landscape very similar to the rest of the classic "South", complete with palmettos and bald cypresses.  The middle of the state is a rapid transition between forested east and dry open plains, so much so that the space of a few miles can actually turn from big sky country into "hey, where did these trees pop up from?", and that big sky country out west is really dry compared to the eastern side. Winter time can feature decent 50's near Arkansas to sub-zero chills in the panhandle.

Texas panhandle, near the Oklahoma border, US 83 southbound. 

I-44 between near Oklahoma City, not much over 100 miles east and a very different world.

As a result, the winds tend to dance a lot in Oklahoma.  The process does happen just as violently, however, in the rest of the area of the great meeting of air masses.  Though not nearly as frequent, tornadoes are a good possibility during the summer storm system all the way up in Ontario and Pennsylvania.  The Ohio and Tennessee river valleys, full of rolling, wooded landscapes, are hardly what people think of as a prime tornado region, and yet the get tornadoes that can sometimes stay on the ground for well over a hundred miles. 

So good grief, we say, and why do people live there, we ask?  People have lived there for over 10,000 years actually.  The practice of living was a bit different, mind you.  The Pawnees, Osage, and other prairie peoples tended to be a bit more mobile than modern prairie people tend to be.  The main reason for this was a food culture based on the plentiful game of the prairies and one in which the drier region could not necessarily be counted on to offer the same bounty as the corn and squash fields back east could.  Even in the lush climate times of the middle ages, when peoples in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southern Great Lakes were building sizable cities with elaborate earth works and farming quite a bit, the plains peoples kept on following the buffalo.  Why?  Probably because a giant hand would come out of the sky and flatten everything in sight.  The Lakota, who originally hailed from Minnesota and northwestern Ontario, abandoned their more permanent settlements when they got chased onto the plains hundreds of years ago by the Ojibwe.  This didn't last forever, of course.  The second born came from the east and started planting permanent settlements.  I often wonder if the first Euro-Americans would have stayed had there been F-5 tornadoes in Jamestown or Quebec...

Initially settlers built half-buried, sod topped houses.  They were easier to make without having to haul in wood from the east, tended to be cooler, and in some cases even afforded a little bit more protection from the violent storms of the great big open sky.  The early prairie pioneers were a tough sort of folk, and many would-be Kansans and Nebraskans turned away screaming when they had to deal with the rugged life on the plains.  Some went back east, many just passed through to places with more promise like California.  Eventually, however (this is the WHY do people live there now bit), improved plows made farming a simpler affair, the legendary tough tallgrass sod being broken by the steel hand of Mr. John Deere.  Free land through the homestead act made the region increasingly attractive, and, well, money talks.  There are cities there now, rather large ones, and economic opportunities keep calling people away from the unemployment of the rust belt. That aside, the area is incredibly beautiful.  Long, open sightlines and a grand drama of the sky, which as you can see in the Texas picture above, is often far more inviting than it is discouraging. 

People tended to bring with them the comforts of home when the wild west became a bit less wild.  Wood frame houses sprang up, and planted trees made little towns feel more like the beloved Virginia or New York that had been left behind.  Yes, storms and drought came along to spook people, but many stayed and some even returned when they became complacent and forgetful.  Like I noted, it took less than a month for Joplin to sit in the back of my mind.  I dare say that is pretty average for people who don't get affected by tornadoes, and I have actually been intimate with three.  Besides, some towns have been around for quite some time and managed to either survive or not see large scale destruction.

Elk City, Oklahoma, main street.  Many of these buildings are from the early twentieth century and look like they have made it OK.

 People recover.  People rebuild.  Plains people and (true) Midwesterners are built from tough stock, so the saying goes.  What can we do about them, or better put, what we can we do in such regions to better handle the big wind?  As any southern Floridian can tell you, wood does not cut it in the face of powerful forces.  While Miami is turning just as wood frame and vinyl sided as the rest of the country, the historical trend for building to resist hurricanes down there was concrete construction.  Sure, an F5 is an F5, but concrete can handle way more than fragile wood can.  In the meantime, donate to the Red Cross to help those who got a pretty potent reminder that we are not always in charge of the world around us.  Better yet, donate in a month's time when the need will still be great and the money flood will slow to a trickle because we all forget about what happened. 

And again, yes, tornadoes are terrifying to be in, and yet also strangely beautiful.  That's how I feel about them anyway.

Humid Subtropical

In my last post I made a half-joke about Lake Erie being the center of a new northern extension of the humid subtropical climate found in the southeastern United States.  So what exactly is "humid subtropical", or even just subtropical for that matter?  In general, a subtropical region is at least one where daytime highs are usually above freezing, even in the coldest months.  More properly, a true subtropical region would not experience even nighttime freezing temperatures, but climactic areas tend to blend with their neighbors in transitional areas.

In the United States, subtropical climates are pretty much kept south of the Ohio river, outside of the higher Appalachian mountains, and curve off in the ends southward into Oklahoma and northward into coastal Connecticut.  That's right, technically speaking, New York City is subtropical.  Yeah, it can snow and get pretty icy there, but I have noticed that even in the coldest years, the snow does not last nearly as long it does back upstate and in the southern Great Lakes (back when it did, anyway) and points north and west.  If you manage to find some of the more natural spaces of New Jersey and Long Island, it will most likely be some pine barrens that will feature an odd conversation piece like a magnolia or two.  Until you hit South Carolina, where palmettos will start to poke up in the underbrush, this scenery will change little along the drier parts of the coastal plain.

Magnolias, Baldcypress, Pines, and company at Jamestown National Historic Site.

How about a bit further inland, past the Appalachians?  Well, the changes will be a bit more subtle.  Evergreen Rhododendrons and Azaleas will start showing up in the more rugged parts, and some of the coniferous trees will disappear until they are replaced by southern species in Tennessee.  As would be the case with developed land on the east coast, though, one would be more likely to notice things like magnolias being planted in increasing frequency the further south one travels.  To my knowledge, the first Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) one can encounter along the main travel routes is in Bowling Green, Kentucky at some hotel parking lot.  Back a few years ago, it stuck out like a sore thumb in a cold March landscape.  Apparently people in Cincinnati have started growing palms in their yards, so the transition zone could be noticeable even further north.

Naturally speaking, a fine indicator of the edge of subtropical land would be the presence of Baldcypress stands along the major rivers.  The furthest northern ones can be found in Indiana and Delaware.  In Arkansas and Virginia they start getting draped with Spanish Moss.  This is probably where the tropical part of subtropical starts making more sense, but again, same-elevation climate transitions are not usually as plain as a line drawn on the map.  In North America, this is especially true.

You see, we have no major east-west mountain ranges here that can block Arctic winter cold fronts.  The fact that warmer weather can even persist so far north at all is largely due to the Gulf of Mexico, which is a sauna that keeps sending heat and humidity north.  In contrast, we also have Hudson Bay, which not only can fight back against the Gulf rather well, but is responsible for maintaining the world's southernmost tundra on our northern half of the planet, right along the coast in Ontario.  About ten thousand years ago and earlier, it was also responsible for maintaining the continental ice sheet across much of Canada and the northern United States.  These days, the Gulf seems to be winning the tug of war, but now and then even during our recent mild years, the frigid north can send hard freezes as far south as Miami and Tampico.  In fact, chilly nights in the lower forties have even been reported in Cuba and Veracruz, places that are definitely well within the limits of true tropical.

Perhaps the northern edge of the subtropical world gets noticed a bit more by someone from northern Ontario.  Heck, I was shocked when I moved to Detroit and first ran into "southern" trees like Tulip trees and hot and steamy Ash tree swamps.  In any event, the next time you take a car trip, you might notice the same subtle changes as you head toward Dixie.