Tornado landmarks and other disaster delights.

In My Humble Opinion
1

In a small town in Wisconsin is a boat. A normal aluminum fishing boat such as you would find in a huge percentage of Wisconsin back yards. It’s about a 17 footer. Three seater. I think it was once painted a dull green. I think it’s either a Lund or an Alumicraft. But if you ask anyone from this small town how the boat is doing, they know exactly what boat you are talking about. This boat has garnered it’s own little bit of fame. And through no fault of it’s own, this boat has become a landmark for all who travel through Siren, Wisconsin.

This boat has managed to wrap itself around a tree. A totnado struck that small time a while back, and the boat stayed as a reminder of a tornado’s raw power.

It got me to thinking. Nature interacts with man always, yet I could think of only a couple other examples of such permanace and interest. The other two don’t hold nearly the interest. One is some infomative graffiti a history minded vandel placed under a Saint Paul, Minnesota bridge overpass. “Hi Water Mark, 1964”. It’s amazed me since childhood for a few reasons. One: what kick ass paint, in the elements since '64 and still legible. Two: I remember sitting in the car as a kid realizing that the car I was in would have been ten feet underwater. Three: you could still see the coloration differance on the bridge pillar caused by the high water. Some twenty-odd years later, another like-mided vandel stepped up and marked the high water line for one of the late twentieth century floods. There again,the pillars showed the lines.

The last one is a vague recolection. Isn’t there a tree in Amsterdam that grew to envelop a bike? Not really a disaster, but another axample of nature’s constant progress.

Are there any other man vs. nature landmarks that I’m clearly spacing out, or do these phenomena just get filed away as local knowledge and quasi-fame?

2

Not terribly far away, we have a large anchor out in a field. A ton and a half anchor, it is. It flew there by itself, shortly after a ship carrying ammonia blew up in Texas City two miles away. It’s not even one of those aerodynamic anchors.

3

Are you thinking of Berkeley Breathed’s book Red Ranger Came Calling? It’s supposedly based on a story his father used to tell about his childhood and a bike embedded ten feet up in a tree on Vashon Island, Washington. ::I surf around a bit:: Hey, I found a photo!

The Bicycle Tree of Vashon Island

It doesn’t look as rusty as the photo in Breathed’s book, though . . . Hm. Maybe somebody climbed up and painted it. The position looks the same.

4

I remember seeing the stopped clock. Also there were a lot of parking meters all bent at the exact same angle. Both left as a reminder of the power of tsunamis. It was pretty awesome walking along and realizing what power was in that wave.
There’s a pair of slippers that a trees is growing around down at the end of the Ala Wai canal. It’s pretty funny.

5

That sounds quite similar to the monument commemorating the the explosion that leveled Halifax Harbour and killed two thousand people in 1917. The shaft of the Mont Blanc’s anchor is fixed to a cairn near the spot where it landed, again, just a bit over two miles away. (You can’t miss it-- just head up Spinnaker until it intersects with Anchor Drive.)

6

There’s a tugboat on the beach down in Biloxi that commemorates Hurricane Camille.