The middle of March

Another week, another storm that somehow slipped around Block Island, the better part of Rhode Island it seems. It was hyped for a week, this great system that would finally give those who longed for it a true dose of winter, a tad late for the first real snow of the season, gone by some definitions.

There was a desperation among the forecasters, looking to the Pacific the way they look to the African coast late in a fall without hurricanes. In another century they would be scanning the horizon for the first sight of the top of a mast of a deep-water sailing vessel gone for years to the other side of the globe.

I go to windy.com, the fun weather site that offers layers and layers of information, temperature of air and water, wind direction and velocity, new and accumulated snow, barometric pressure, all delivered in bright colors, flowing across the screen of whichever device I am using. It offers all matter of data, hot spots in the ocean that will feed depressions or restart waning hurricanes, cooler walls that will tamp them down.

This time of year it is most of all the direction of the wind. Even more than its speed.

It was Tuesday that it became clear things were not happening in most of Rhode Island as anticipated. While we were out of the storm’s path on most stations and site,s we were freakishly out of the path on windy, the stronger winds swept down west of us then turned to the east, the greens and yellows around us an angry purple as it headed for Nantucket.

There had been no alerts for Block Island while Nantucket, over the horizon to the east, had both coastal flooding and severe high wind alerts. Said we are so small it is easier for a system to slip around us than waste any energy beating our shores. It made no sense but it is as good as I have heard.

The boats stopped running Monday afternoon and were canceled Tuesday. The sea had been high and pounding, I knew, because my windshield was covered with a gray mist of salt. But the wind had come round from the east and knocked it down, out toward the horizon on that no-boat day the surface looked calm, flat and blue, the great heaving monster that breathes deeply, the source of ground swells looked tamed.

When I went out Tuesday afternoon there were three cars by the monument where people have stopped as long as I can remember to watch the ocean. I’d ask my mother what they were doing and she’d just smile and say “they like to look at the water.” Now, they pull into the Solviken parking lot as well, to watch the boat come in or just let the salty Atlantic pull at their imaginations.

Three cars on an iffy-weather Tuesday seemed like a lot but I paid it no mind until there were five when I headed home. There had to be something going on and the road was empty so I pulled over ahead of them, dutifully switched on my flashers and looked at the water, wide and blue and calm until it was close to land, where it felt the bottom rising up to stop its advance. Hidden energy released, those white horses reared up in protest and finally I spotted the surfers, dark in their wet suits, trying to catch that elusive wave. There has been no ice to chase after this year.

At first I thought it was March and windy, the cold wind from the west cutting the thermometer reading of 39. Then I remember a winter day at least 15 years ago going down to Mansion on a brutally cold afternoon and meeting a high-school lad with a video camera. He’d been filming the surfers, he told me.

And they were still there, out in the water by Jerry’s Point, grabbing what bit of light they could on a short day when the air was far below freezing. They sailed around the big boulders, some jumping off their boards only at the edge of the sand, just before friction halted them.

I asked one of them, once, how they dared it and he insisted they just followed the flow of the water. Perhaps there was something to that theory about the way the worst of so many storms skittle around Block Island.

Watching the surfers sitting out there waiting for the lowest rolls of water to turn in an instant to waves and remembering those black shapes shooting into the rocky beach at Jerry’s so many years ago my mind turns, naturally, to seals that rollick and roll in the ocean, creatures protected from the cold by their fine coats over plump bodies, graceful as swallows on the wing.

There are probably surfing seals in children’s books I’ve never seen so I just imagine them wondering at these sleek, svelte bodies with real arms and legs standing on boards, making all that effort to ride a wave. And no effort whatsoever to dive in and snarf a fish or two. Curious animals clad in unnatural skins.

If there are surfer-seals in books they are likely sea lions anyway, West Coast types, with their big flippers and ability to perform antics, tricks.

It was a funny day, Tuesday, while we waited for the storm that slipped around us, dumped real snow up north but kept Rhode Island newscasters on a search for flakes bordering on the comical. They stopped drivers on a street in one of those interchangeable mainland towns, one that apparently often floods, given the reaction to an excited “have you ever seen it like this!?”

“All the time.” It could have been a goofy movie, driving around Rhode Island looking for more than a few snowflakes, or at least a flood, hoping for a downed tree which by some miracle one of them seems not only to find but to witness. They did have great wave footage from Scituate, the Scituate in Massachusetts where houses are behind a seawall against which waves crash, making one wonder whoever approved that!?

They had a sloppy surfer or two down Narragansett way but nothing like those riding the current of our wide ocean, sailing over water that was changing in color like the low end of the wind velocity spectrum on my weather-watcher site.