Day 307, Year 6: Goodnight, Irene
Date: Saturday, August 27, 2011
Weather: Cloudy, Then Overcast and Foggy; Some Rain, No Wind
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
All day today the song “Goodnight, Irene” kept playing over and over in my head. So I Googled it and found out on Wikipedia that it was a song first recorded by Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter in the 1930’s. The piece went on to explain that the song tells the story of Lead Belly’s troubled past with his lover Irene. The first verse goes like this:
Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight
Goodnight Irene, Goodnight Irene
I’ll see you in my dreams.
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump in the river and drown.
According to Wikipedia, the inspiration for Ken Kesey’s novel “Sometimes a Great Notion” came from that verse. Interesting how one artist borrows from another. But more to the point, let’s talk about Irene the Hurricane. We heard from both my sister Patsy and her husband Joe and our friends Lee and Lynda Kaufman this morning after Hurricane Irene hit well north of them in North Carolina. They were having high winds but not much else in the way of after effects. We also heard from our cruising friends Jean and Ken of Renaissance 2000 who left their home in Canada to travel down to be with their boat in the Chesapeake. We’ll be anxious to hear how they fared and now we are waiting to see what is going to happen here. It certainly doesn’t look like we are going to be hit nearly as hard as expected, but we’ll just wait and see.
We were up early doing some of the final preparations and then I took Mark to West Marine and I went to Heather and Jed’s to help harvest food from the garden. Mark was giving a seminar on navigation at 11 am but because of the weather only one of the people who signed up actually showed up. He went ahead with the seminar and will probably do it again next Saturday. Sylvia, the manager, asked Mark to do a series of Saturday seminars, so there will be more during the month of September. At noon, Sam and I picked Mark up and the three of us went back to Woods Hole to make sure everything was done to prepare Windbird for the storm. Somehow we spent a couple of hours doing those last little things and then we hoisted the dinghy motor up on its mount, secured it, and then rowed to shore. We pulled Baby Bird (Sam’s name for our dinghy) up on land and tied her to a tree. This gave us a good chance to look at her bottom which is covered in barnacles. We’ll have to take care of that on Monday before we put her back into the water. We have noticed that other dinghies in Eel Pond have bottom paint on them to prevent growth and I think we need to consider that.
We’ve had a delightful evening here at Heather and Jed’s and are just waiting for the weather. We have had drizzle, but no hard rain. So I guess it’s time to go to bed and see what the morning brings. Goodnight, Irene.
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110827 Day 307a Cape Cod, USA–Toad in the Backyard |
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110827 Day 307b Cape Cod, USA–Preparing for Irene |