The beauty of peak hurricane season

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There is, I assume, more much more trepidation than beauty experienced by denizens of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coastal lowlands during peak hurricane season. I think, without an ion of glee, that it may just be the price people pay to live a few miles from white sand beaches and rum shacks, gorge on fresh, affordable seafood at will, and escape the torment of long winters. There are also crosses to bear when emigrating to Champaign, Illinois. It's the nation's most mentally and morally conservative Big 10 university town. Our current alpha creatures are real estate people intent on digging out every last green space in the county to make room for unneeded new townhouses and strip malls in a moribund market. The downsides here are less dramatic than for coastal people, but I'd bet our list is much longer (and beyond the scope of this post).

But hurricane season here is outstanding. The careful observer living in the Corn Belt can often peg the beginning of hurricane season, in all its local splendor, to the week if not to the day. Two groups of people are most likely to take note: farmers (but not necessarily agri-businessmen riding in hermetically sealed, GPS-navigated combines the size of a Gothic cathedral) and road cyclists (bi-, not necessarily motor-).

One leading indicator conspicuous to both farmers and cyclists is the prevailing wind direction, which changes here somewhat abruptly from southwesterly to southeasterly and easterly. Another indicator, somewhat less consistent, is humidity, which drops significantly around the time prevailing wind directions change. The humidity drop happens to be convenient to grain farmers, who want to dry down the corn and beans as much as possible in the fields to promote cost-efficient harvesting and marketing. It's also convenient to cyclists, who appreciate hot sun combined with pleasant evaporative cooling effects. I'm certain these weather shifts are directly related to the overarching climate patterns that originate in the tropical mid-Atlantic at this time of the year, but I'm not a weatherman so I can't document that. It's a correlation observed across decades.

Our "twin cities" had a few previews of the change in wind early this month. But last week --- Wednesday, I think --- the area was abruptly overshadowed by an uncharacteristically gray, gloomy day. From the interior of an over-chilled government building, looking out any window, the vibe was late October or November (and even somewhat chilly outdoors after the "closing bell"). Sometime around that day, either the night before or after, about 1.6 inches of badly needed rain fell on the asparagus garden. Then, suddenly, meteorological glory. Bike riding patterns after work became almost exclusively outbound to the southeast, east, and even north once. The object is to ride into the draft on the way out, not on the way home while the sun is racing to auger into the west horizon. Fortuitously, due to seasonal characteristics related to Terra's orbit around the sun on an oblique axis, last 180 minutes of daylight every day for the past week-plus has fully qualified as the elusive Golden Hour that landscape photographers prize so highly. And, as if right on cue, in the Atlantic and near the Caribbean, a new crop of tropical depressions and storms began to sprout.

This is peak hurricane season in the Corn Belt: made for communing with the genial, sunny Midwestern elements in solitude. Perched on the saddle of a lightweight aluminum touring bike tanked up with water bottles; a power bar in the saddle pack; biosystems exerting straight ahead with the help of endorphins and Advil, to a soundtrack of the wind and other breathing; and a fully charged cell phone that one hopes will have signal were a tire to blow 5 miles south of Villa Grove.