SERENDIPITY

Marilyn Armstrong — Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth

Tag Archives: East Coast of the United States


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The White Hurricane of 1888

Today is my birthday. It’s also the anniversary of the biggest, baddest blizzard to ever hit the east coast of the United States. This year, it snowed just the other day. There’s talk of more snow next week. The early part of March is frequently stormy. Blizzards are relatively common, though usually when the sun is this high in the sky, the snow melts pretty quickly. But not always.

75-StormHPCR-92012 was a mild, snowless winter. This year has given us a couple of serious storms, though it could have been worse. It has been worse.

I appear to have been karmically destined for snowy climes. This is not only the story of a storm, but a cautionary tale to never forget winter isn’t over until the daffodils are in bloom. You can never overestimate how dangerous weather in this region can be, especially this time of year when wind patterns become unstable with the upcoming change of seasons.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 11. There had been a blizzard a few days before, but apparently it wasn’t a problem because I was safely born in Brooklyn Women’s Hospital. Nonetheless, throughout my childhood, no one in my family ever neglected to mention the blizzard that had hit the area just before I was born.

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Early March is a fine time for big snowstorms in the northeast. March 11, 1888 brought the biggest winter storm to ever hit the region. Known locally as the Brooklyn Blizzard of 1888 and up and down the east coast as the Great White Hurricane, it is my birthday blizzard, a foretaste of Marilyn to come. Or something like that.

It was the worst blizzard to ever hit New York city and broke records from Virginia to Maine. It remains one of the worst — and most famous — storms in United States history. Accumulations of 40 to 50 inches were recorded. It’s hard to picture how much snow that is unless you’ve been through a few really big snowstorms. The deepest snow from one storm in my life so far was 28 inches. That’s only a bit more than half the amount of the 1888 blizzard. Despite all the changes and improvements to technology and infrastructure, that volume of snow would still paralyze us today. It’s more snow than any infrastructure can handle.

Did I mention snow is heavy? 50 inches on a standard roof will cause it to cave in. It would crush us.

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It wasn’t merely a snow storm. The super storm included sub-zero temperatures and gale force winds. It was one of those occasions when people get put in their place, forcibly reminded of how strong Mother Nature is.

The storm blanketed areas of  New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. It carried with it sustained winds of more than 45 miles per hour. It produced drifts in excess of 50 feet. My house, at its peak, is about 40 feet, so so we are talking about drifts as high as a three-story building.

All forms of transportation were stopped. Roads and railroads were unusable. People were trapped in their houses for up to a week.

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The Great White Hurricane paralyzed the U.S. East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine. The storm extended all the way up into the Atlantic provinces of Canada. The telegraph went down, leaving  major cities including Montreal, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Boston without communication for days to weeks. Because of the storm, New York began putting its telegraph and telephone wiring underground to protect it from future disasters.

Stereoview picture of Grand Street in New Brit...

Grand Street in New Britain, Connecticut, published by F. W. Allderige in 1888.

The seas and coastlines were not spared. In total, from the Virginia coast to New England, more than 200 ships were grounded or wrecked and more than 100 seamen died.

125 years later, no winter storm has topped the big one of 1888.

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30,000 hits … Go figure.

It seemed appropriate — what with getting all these awards during the last few days — that this is the week I hit another landmark. On November 9th, I passed 20,000 hits and today, exactly 3 weeks later, I hit

30,000

From February 2012, through the end of September, I gathered 10,000 hits. It took me a slightly more than a month to get the next 10,000. On November 9, I was at 20, 783.

At 11:38 pm — right now — I am at 30,044, which is just about 10,000 hits in three crammed weeks.

When there’s a lot of stuff going on, people come looking for more than information. We all want explanations, validation, confirmation that what we believe is right or what we disbelieve is wrong. Those of us who put ourselves out there gain a certain amount of popularity, maybe notoriety or at least a degree of attention in return for fending off a lot of flak for having expressed opinions with which others do not agree. I try to back my opinion with facts, at least as far as I am can establish whatever facts exist. In the end though, facts are slippery as eels, subject to innumerable interpretations. Statistics are easily twisted to support virtually any position. Numbers are neutral, but what we do with them is not.

November 2012 was a newscaster and blogger’s dream. The richness of the available subject matter for a writer was unlimited.  It gave me a lot of room to stretch my writer’s wings, to try writing about things that would normally not fall in my purview.

The dreams of writers and reporters inevitably are built on events that are someone else’s nightmare. Sometime since the advent of electronic media has come to dominate the news industry, news no longer means information about current events … what’s happening. It used to be that news might be good or bad. News was merely “new.” It was the newness that counted, not any predetermined content.

It’s different now. Today, all news is bad news. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the unofficial motto of newsrooms around the nation and probably the globe. Violence and death draws an audience. If a story has a happy ending, it’s likely relegated to feature status or considered “not newsworthy” and thus completely ignored.

Lacking fresh disasters, the next hot ticket in the news biz are scandals, financial crises, sports, weather, and anything happening to a celebrity. These days, we have celebrities who are famous for being famous. They’ve never done anything noteworthy. They don’t act, sing, play an instrument or invent things. They aren’t politicians or scientists. They are nobodies. I hope I am never desperate enough to write about any of them. Since I have pretty much no idea of who is currently famous, I’m unlikely to write about them. Most of the time, guests on talk shows are strangers to me. I can’t tell one from another. Neither can my husband. If you are looking for the latest gossip, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. I have neither information nor opinions on the subject.

Election day 2012I plead guilty to enjoying lively discussion and controversy, though I require civility however much we disagree. I figure we should be able maintain the same level of manners in public disputation that we would demand of a 5-year-old. That has turned out to be an unreasonably high expectation when issues of national importance were under discussion. No kindergarten teacher would allow such appalling behavior from her charges, but we not only tolerate, but actually encourage worse behavior from public figures.

As angry as I have been about policies and issues, I have been far more upset by the bad behavior of public figures, many with advanced degrees slinging mud, calling names, and clearly trying to incite violence. There ought to be limits, there ought to be a level below which we will not sink. Watching “Lincoln” yesterday reminded me how uncivil our public behavior has been over the years. The difference between then and now is the presence of electronic media that allows everyone to immediately see — in real-time — how ill-mannered we really are. It used to be a dirty little secret; now it’s an international embarrassment.

The sheer energy generated by so many major events occurring at the same time helped me gain an audience at a faster rate than I could have done had there not been so many important events occurring. There was Sandy, the giant storm. A storms is inherently uncivil. Storms have an excuse. They have no brain cells, just mighty wind, rain or snow … so a storm has an excuse for mindlessness, but what excuse can there be for people like Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck?  Perhaps they too lack brain cells. But more likely, they simply like a conscience and the level of manners required of a pre-schooler.

I get a reasonable number of regular visitors these days. I’m not exactly viral but I have an acceptable following. The number of visitors rises and falls according to some invisible tide over which I have nominal control . When Serendipity’s visitor count first popped up from 70 or 80 on a good day to over a thousand, I figured it was a fluke and would fizzle. As I expected, the visitor count has leveled off, but apparently people who initially dropped by for a particular post continued to return for other things. I am more inclined to trust the new, steadier numbers I get now than the wild up and downs surges of early and mid November.Here, Griffin!

It’s harder to find relevant, exciting content when there are no super exciting events in progress, but I try to stay relevant, try to find interesting subjects. Maybe make a few people laugh or at least smile. I like offering historical background for whatever is going on, the rest of the story we didn’t get in elementary school. Understanding the world is easier if you have the perspective of history. Context counts.

Thanks for reading, thanks for being my friends and making me feel that I’m still a real live part of the living world.  Let’s all hope that this year is going to be a better one than last year. Maybe less full of news, but more full of joy!


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Ideas to Get Your Numbers UP: 20,000 hits and I nearly missed it

My own numbers almost got lost in the election count the other night. I crossed over the 20,000 mark sometime during the course of election coverage.

20,000 (and a few hundred more)

From February 2012, through the end of September, I gathered 10,000 hits. It took me a few days more than a month to get the next 10,000 hits. As of today, or as of a little while go, I am at 20, 783.

I get a lot more visitors that I used to and they show up regularly. When Serendipity’s visitor count first popped up from 70 or 80 on a good day to more than 600, I figured it was a fluke that would quickly fizzle. It leveled off, but didn’t fizzle.

I feel like Sally Field saying “You like me, you really LIKE me.” I need to say yet another thank you to Sharla at Awakenings and CatnipofLife who has helped me navigate the growth process. I have learned an incredible amount from her and she is such a gracious, good-hearted woman. Sharla, you are a star!

Now, although there are dips and peaks, on a “bad” day I get two to three hundred visitors (not counting followers on WordPress, Bloggers, Pinterest and Twitter). On a good day, 500 to 600 isn’t unusual. I have accepted that something happened, something changed. It isn’t the audience — they don’t change — so it had to be me.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and I think I have finally figured out some of the reasons why people read my blog or probably, any blog.

It starts with writing about interesting stuff and presenting it well. That ought to go without saying, but it doesn’t, not really. Many of us — especially me! — have favorite subjects, subjects that are important to us and that are not popular. I won’t stop writing this material, but it is never going to have a huge audience either.

There are a lot of unattractive sites on the web. Too cluttered, bad color choices, hard on the eyes. Too much happening on the page. A lot of people apparently throw things together without much regard for the aesthetic elements. I am much more likely to read something that’s easy on the eyes and I suspect so are most people.

A lightbulb went off when I got thousands of hits on a reblog about hurricane Sandy. Anyone could have as easily read the same article on its original website. I was also NOT showing up at the top of a Google search. I searched using the phrase everyone else was using and I could not find me at all … so people had to be intentionally seeking me out. Instead of reading the original article, they flocked to my site. So let’s give me a point or two for presentation. My blog is easy to look at. I follow the rules for keeping white space aplenty and making sure there are more than enough graphics to break up blocks of text.

But that could not be all of it. I examined the total content for various days when the number went very high and I realized that all of them involved current stories in which everyone was interested. I tended to clump stories around a theme, then add more pieces. I typically supplement a reblogged post with extra graphics and photographs if I can, plus my commentary and analysis. I leave the original story intact, but add to it. Sometimes my additions are longer than the original, but I never mess with the author’s original (except to occasionally fix typos that my auto-editor catches … I’m sure no author minds having typos fixed — I sure don’t!)

Unlike the original blog which was a standalone feature, I followed a trail. I gathered up pictures and memories of hurricanes and other storms and wrote about them. I got Garry to talk about his experiences with the Blizzard of 1978, and other storms. I roamed the web to see what was happening in various places being hit by the storm. Although I focused on Sandy and it’s impact on Coney Island, I found other places down on the Jersey coast being equally (or worse) affected and posted what I could get about these area.

I added material, especially photographs, historical background and apocryphal stories. There was no intentional method to my madness. I just did what I do for myself when something interests me. I get into bloodhound mode and I follow wherever the scent leads me. That’s how I learn. I started in one place and the circles widened to include more and more stuff.

I included stories that were not directly related to the impact of Sandy on the mid-Atlantic coast, but were thematically related; second cousins by marriage, if you like. There have been other monster storms that have paralyzed the region, relatively recently and in the remembered past. It was a good time to feed my personal fondness for history by giving it facts to munch on.  A lifetime’s enthusiasm for research doesn’t hurt. Some people get bored, but I find research fascinating. It can keep me glued to the computer for days on end.

I Googled “hurricanes past 100 years East Coast” and could have filled an encyclopedia with the results. Research became stories. I hunted down historical photographs. I remembered stories I heard from relatives and friends about storms they remembered. And then, there is my secret weapon: my husband who in covering storms in New England for more than 30 years, is a bottomless repository of amazing stories.

I offered a lot of information, stories, mood pieces and more or less stitched them together so that while each post was separate, they formed a continuity. One thing led to another. When I thought about this storm, I remembered other storms, wrote about the storm that hit on my birthday in 1889 … and I offered facts, stories, and historical background, sidebars, and photographs. The combination worked. Folks came to read one story and stayed to read more. Some of them signed on as followers. Others check in less regularly, but they come back.

I have a lot more visitors than I used to. And finally, I think I have a pretty good idea what attracts visitors.

Here are three little ideas to help boost your numbers, if that matters to you. If you don’t care about whether or not anyone reads what you write, that’s okay. To each his own. But if like most of us, you would prefer to have more rather than fewer visitors, here we go:

  1. Be current. You don’t have to be a newspaper or make every post about current events or other news, but don’t ignore big events going on in the world around you. You don’t even have to write these stories yourself. Which brings me to the next point.
  2. Reblog or use ScoopIt when you find well-written, relevant posts. If other people have done a great job writing about important issues, you can better spend your time doing something that hasn’t been thoroughly covered by others. It can be a different slant on the same subject, graphics rather than text, or something completely different. Being relevant doesn’t mean you have to write it, only that you should include it. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. If you find well-written stories on an important issue, the author’s voice can speak through you.
  3. When something very signficant or interesting is happening … the election, the hurricane, the new season of television, the upcoming Oscars … pay attention. You don’t have to write exclusively about that one subject, but you should not ignore major events either. It’s fine to march to the beat of your own drum, but it’s good to also pay attention to what  the rest of the band is playing.

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Ivory towers can be lonely places. If you want company, you need to associate with the rest of the world and pay at least some attention to what interests them. If you write entirely for yourself, it’s a diary, not a blog.

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