Wednesday Morning

When the colonists arrived in what is now the I95 corridor, they sailed up the major rivers. From Washington DC to Philadelphia, they encountered waterfalls and rapids beyond which they could not navigate. The Coastal Plain terminated at these points, and in DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia, you find elevations that range from just a few feet above sea level to greater than 400 feet in their northwest sections. It became a natural place to settle, with commercial fleets able to dock in one part of town while water-powered mills sprouted next to streams and rivers. The dividing line was called the Fall Line. It is well-described in this item developed by the USGS:

But...that is not the Fall Line I refer to in the headline. Instead, I use it to describe a time horizon with the warm weather in view now but a chill looming just out of sight, but surely approaching. Perhaps, when we look back, this "fall line" will mark the boundary between times that were often warm to future times when it is more chilly. A low pressure area moving though the Great Lakes will cause rain there today amd its associated cold front can cause a band of showers and even a few thunderstorms to move across the Northeast and Middle Atlantic region tomorrow afternoon. Behind the front it will be much cooler. It now appears that any additional storms that form along tomorrow's front will be well offshore, making the weekend quite cool, but sunny for most of the Northeast quarter of the country.

Looking ahead to next week, another cold front should arrive on Monday, and the air behind that one will be colder than with the airmass that moves in for the weekend. It would not be surprising too see some snow showers downwind from the lakes and over the higher terrain as the new chill arrives.

A washed out moon presides over a tree in autumn costume. Photo by Elliot Abrams

Fall days can bring wondrous variety:

We can have windy days. In the nooks and crannies around buildings on a dry day you see dust, paper scraps and leaf fragments whipped into whirlpools, the tiny pieces sucked in and thrown out as the vortex vanishes.

Out in the countryside, cumulus cloud shadows race along the ground, racing along the ridges and vaulting the valleys. The trees, still in leaf. have their twigs twisted and their branches bent. In the fields and weedlots, unseen waves ripple the tassels and taller grass blades, the surface rippling like waves on a lake.

Other autumn days like today are just the opposite: cool calm mornings and quiet mellow afternoons. Tiny spider mites weave threads and fragile strands that drift in the slightest puff of wind. The leaves detach from their summer homes to form a carpet of brown crinkle on the forest floor. Acorns snap to ground. Squirrels dash and munch. You can still feel a hint of summer in the afternoon air, but the long shadows of late afternoon and the early dusk make us sense somehow the summer party is over

Only later do we find ourselves skewered on the rotisserie of reality, sucked in by the shop-vac of autumn's summer remnants, raked over by nature's leaf blower, the rototiller of northerly winds... the annual chilly eraser transforming the artful tapestry of October to the gray canvas of late fall and winter.

Posted by Elliot Abrams on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 5:34 AM
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