AN ERIE STORY

Like each of the other four* Great Lakes, Lake Erie has many moods. All of them have their appeal, except maybe the wildest storms if you live right on the shore like I do! I think my favorite mood of the lake is when it's perfectly calm, almost mirror-like, and the light and air play tricks with the horizon and perspective, making things like fishing net floats look like a string of beads floating in some strange cosmic void. (click for best viewing)


Lake Erie is:

• the fourth largest of the five Great Lakes by surface area (and the tenth largest lake globally) but is the smallest and shallowest of the Great Lakes by volume - and therefore is the warmest, and has the shortest average water residence time.

• bounded on the north by the Canadian province of Ontario, on the south by the U.S. states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, and on the west by the state of Michigan.

• named after the Erie tribe of Native Americans who lived along its southern shore.

• an average depth of 62 feet (19 m) and a maximum depth of 210 feet (64 m). For comparison, Lake Superior has an average depth of 483 feet (147 m).

• primarily fed by the Detroit River (from Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair) and drains via the Niagara River and Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario.

• home to Point Pelee National Park, the southernmost point of the Canadian mainland, located on a peninsula extending into the lake. Several islands are found in the western end of the lake; these belong to Ohio except for Pelee Island and 8 neighboring islands, which are part of Ontario.

• host to a number of cities on it's shores, including Buffalo, New York; Erie, Pennsylvania; Toledo, Ohio; Port Stanley, Ontario; Monroe, Michigan; and Cleveland, Ohio, and of course, Leamington , Ontario where I currently live!
  

* In 1998 Lake Champlain was officially declared the sixth Great Lake. I've been on Lake Champlain, it's a very nice lake, although definitely the runt of the glacial litter compared to the truly great ones surrounding the Michigan mitt, where I grew up. To me there will always be just five Great Lakes!

WATERY WEDNESDAY – Feeling the Effects of the Lake Effect*

Here’s a tiny little waterfall located just east of my computer. I sincerely hope you like the view; it’s the best I could muster for WW this week. Really, you ask? Well, yes, pretty much. Despite all my whining in my previous post, spring is not giving us a break on the Lake Erie north shore. The weather forecasters have us down for 15-25 cm or 5-9 in of s*** (the other S word) today. We’re well over ankle deep already. And that would be new snow, added to the huge honkin’ piles of it we already have (do I sound bitter?). Not only that, it’s been so cold around here that there is no open water to be found, so one must make do when posting for a watery meme (hence the homemade waterfall).

For those of you who live in where it is warm and sunny right now, I’ll throw in a photo (taken from inside!) of some of our local frozen falling water, just for fun, because you’re at a safe distance from it! And thanks to all of you who left such encouraging comments yesterday; I’m feelin’ the love!


* Lake-effect snow is produced in the winter when cold winds move across long expanses of warmer lake water, providing energy and picking up water vapor which freezes and is deposited on the lee shores. The same effect over bodies of salt water is called ocean effect snow, sea effect snow, or even bay effect snow. The effect is enhanced when the moving air mass is uplifted by the orographic effect of higher elevations on the downwind shores. This uplifting can produce narrow, but very intense bands of precipitation, which deposit at a rate of many inches of snow each hour and often bringing copious snowfall totals. The areas affected by lake-effect snow are called snowbelts. This effect occurs in many locations throughout the world, but is best known in the populated areas of the Great Lakes of North America. (from Wikipedia)




For view more photos of water around the world, and to play along,
visit Watery Wednesday.

LITTERING FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I am quite the beachcomber now that I live here on the Lake Erie shore. And one of the things I enjoy most is finding pieces of beachglass. Now, official beachglass experts (or seaglass, as it's more frequently called, even though it can be found on freshwater beaches of the Great Lakes) have studied the subject to great length, depth and breadth, and can tell you all the colors to be found, and how rare or common each color is. They can even say how many bits of glass it might take you to find a certain color, e.g. one is every 10,000 pieces seen and/or collected might produce a piece of orange – the rarest color. I don’t know about some of that info, I found a pretty rare color after just a few walks (and probably only a couple hundred pieces seen). Not that it matters, really. The joy is in the surroundings, playing tag with the waves, feeling the breeze, hearing the gulls…and finding a wave-frosted prize in the sand.

After looking at the chart of beachglass colors I realized that the really spectacular colors are becoming quite rare. For one thing, there’s not as much glass as there used to be. Plastic has replaced much so many of the glass containers of old, and along with that, the colors of glass available today are pretty much clear, brown and green. And then there’s recycling. Soon after that insight, while cupping my day’s collection of deep cobalt blue, bright turquoise, and buttery yellow in my palm, I formed an idea. I decided to haunt yard sales and thrift shops, and buy up as many glass items in red, cobalt and other jewel colors as I could find, and then when I had a big bag filled with them, I’d take them out into the lake and release them into the waves. I know it’s littering, but really, what’s glass but sand anyway. And eventually, if no one finds it, the beachglass will be ground away to nothing. But I like to think that in forty or fifty years, someone else will be walking along the beach and stoop to pick up a beautiful red nugget, be amazed, and wonder how it got there. I wonder about that now, only I know what I find probably went into the lake as someone’s trash. The future person who finds mine won’t know it, but it was put there just for them.