In The Flow of Time – July 9, 2024
Gee, Beryl just went by here. Why am I thinking of hurricanes?
As I research, I build a timeline spreadsheet. Sometimes I only know a year, or a season (there was drought one summer, endless rain another). Oftentimes I know precise dates. This is just a backdrop to provide some historical verisimilitude when I get to plotting the story. Hey, I’m nuts. If July 4, 1874 becomes a day in the story, I don’t want to describe it as sunny picnics and fireworks when in fact 7.52” of rain fell.
Disease epidemics. River floods. Slave trade. Who was mayor. What was the population. As I think of a topic, I go off to research the history, find dates when shit happened, make a list, check it twice. The large majority of these will never, ever matter to the story. It is often a form of drudgery, but it satisfies my pedantic geekiness.
I’ve always been a weather nut. Tropical storms? This morning, I dug up Louisiana Hurricane History by David Roth of the US National Weather Service. Thirty five storms are now in my timeline.
The author provides a likely storm track from Oct 3-8, 1837, of a major hurricane.
“The Racer’s Storm hit Matamoras, Mexico and caused great devastation to the Texas coast while recurving northeast and striking Louisiana just east of Cameron on the 6th . It then moved east along the Gulf coast and headed out into the Atlantic by the 10th (track on the right). Storm surges of 8 feet above the normal high tide on Lake Pontchartrain. The original wooden Bayou St. John lighthouse , the first of its kind built by the United States outside the original 13 colonies, was swept into obscurity.”
Marie Laveau had property on the Lake. Bayou St John and that lighthouse are likely locations. I don’t know, but if Oct. 6, 1837 ends up in the story, I know what the weather was like. 🙂
