I miss some things about Florida, where I lived until three years ago, but I don’t miss hurricanes or hurricane season. It’s difficult to describe the pit-of-stomach dread you feel when you watch those monsters roll across the Atlantic like slo-mo bowling balls … and you’re a wobbly pin on the other end of the strike.
So last week as I watched Hurricane Frances chug toward my former home, I worried for my friends and loved ones there. And thought about my old house, the one on the barrier island that I had to say good-bye to every time another big storm threatened to roll through. I always hauled when they sounded the evacuation alarm, and each time I was able to come home at the all-clear. I hope the old place made it this time, too.
Yes, an atmospheric howler the size of Texas is a blunt reminder that nature’s power is a Cat Five humbler.
It is simply bigger than we are, and there is only so much we can know or do about its plans for us.
Sure, we apply our science to enlarge and deepen that pool of knowledge, but at some point all we’re left with is prediction.
That’s true with hurricanes in summer. And with snowfall in winter.
One of the anticipated annual traditions in The Courier-Journal is Byron Crawford’s column that includes folk forecasting of area winter weather. I hadn’t lived here but a few weeks before I heard about it. Kind of reminded me of how Florida readers anticipated the annual hurricane-tracking map that newspapers routinely published.
One of the people featured in the yearly column is “treeologist” Dick Frymire of Irvington, who, in the words of Crawford, “compiles his snow forecasts by studying leaves from his `weather tree’ and other secret climatological data.”
That methodology may not carry the same scientific heft of that of, say, the National Hurricane Center, but it’s interesting, great fun to read and it has a following: Readers like to clip it and save it, and see how accurate Frymire is.
This year, some readers may have had difficulty in parsing Frymire’s predictions because they were presented a little differently than they had been in the past.
Crawford’s Aug. 29 column conveying the dates and predictions was edited to condense the space devoted to Frymire’s information. Why? A smaller page size for the new press means that Crawford doesn’t have as much space for his column as he used to.
Bottom line in this case: That condensation confused and/or confounded several dozen people who contacted Frymire.
While I had no trouble in understanding the information in the column, I also understand that other people could have, and did.
And I think that when a newspaper does something that pleases readers that we ought not to mess it up, even in the name of trying to save space.
So, I’m going to repeat each of Frymire’s predictions on separate lines, as Crawford always has in the past (and originally did this year), to make it easier for those folks to read.
Remember, give or take two days for the forecast, and as Frymire warns, “If a heavy fog comes in before nightfall and lingers until 11 p.m. on any of the first 10 days of January, the winter will be worse than anticipated.”
On to the Frymire forecast:
- Oct. 4 or 9 light frost
- Oct 15 or 21 killing frost
- Nov. 3 flurries
- Nov. 8 flurries
- Nov. 16 flurries
- Nov. 24 tracking snow
- Nov. 26 1-inch snow
- Dec. 6 1-inch snow
- Dec. 13 1-inch snow
- Dec. 22 2-inch snow
- Dec. 25 1-inch snow
- Jan. 4 2-inch snow
- Jan. 8-Feb. 10 very cold
- Jan. 12 1-inch snow
- Jan. 17 5-inch snow
- Jan. 19 Coldest day of winter, 8 degrees below zero
- Jan. 22 4-inch snow
- Jan. 27 1-inch snow
- Feb. 11 2-inch snow
- Feb. 17 sleet and hazardous driving
- Feb. 22 1-inch snow
- Feb. 26 first robin, 11:16 a.m. EST
- March 5 flurries
- March 11 1-inch snow
- March 22 Will be 64 degrees
- April 8 last snow (flurries)
