Watching the various weather signs yesterday morning as closely as a jungle tracker (or desert tracker, or suburban mother looking for a parking place at the mall), I realized fairly early that the Warnings which I was following were turning out to have been perhaps slightly excessive.
Caution is a superb thing and we should all have more of it, except for when we shouldn’t, I mean. But I have the sensation — and so does Lino — that a certain amount of exaggeration has crept into the whole business of predicting acqua alta. Why?
This is what water announced by the siren plus one tone looked like at 11:30 outside our house. The tide was just about ready to turn.
One reason, and I’m just hypothesizing here, could be that the people in the Tide Center (particularly its battle-hardened director, Paolo Canestrelli, who would feel perfectly at home with Field Marshal Montgomery) are up to here with the shrieking imprecations from people inconvenienced by a change in the situation from the earlier prediction to the reality suddenly underfoot.
As I have already noted, the weather picture can change. Get over it.
Another reason — here, let me move that firing-range target to the side and stand there in its place — could be the relentless need for the many forces involved in the MOSE project to instill public dread of water on the ground. Even brief articles in the Gazzettino which mention a (not “the,” but “a”) possibility of high water the following day don’t bear down too hard on the word “possibility.” They like the effect the words “acqua alta” have on people, if put in a way that makes it sound as if you need to head for the storm cellar.
Acqua alta is always very clear.
In any case, just remember that any article that you may read that implies, or even says, that “Venice was flooded” is a bit excessive. We didn’t get any water on our ground and we’re in Venice. Is San Marco’s high water better than ours? Prettier? Wetter?
If you have any interest in the damage water can seriously do to people, places and things, don’t get fixated on Venice, but look at other areas of the Veneto such as Vicenza and Verona, and even in Tuscany, over the past few days. Torrential rains, bursting riverbanks, highways and roads blocked and even broken by racing water, mudslides obliterating houses and the helpless people within them (like the mother and her two-year-old son whose bodies were dug out of their mud-filled house, still clinging to each other) — these are events involving water which deserve more publicity than they get.
Actually, “mudslide” is too innocuous a word for what happened in Tuscany after days of rain. Essentially a huge chunk of melting mountain just broke off and fell on this family’s house. Just like that. No warning sirens, no time to do anything except die. There are many families who have lost everything. Some people have drowned.
Parts of the Veneto have now been declared disaster areas. Venice was not on the list.
I’m sitting here at 7:30 waiting to see what the water is going to do.
This is not the first time this fall that water has come ashore (as it probably will), but it’s the first time I’m taking it slightly more seriously — and by “seriously” I don’t mean I’m pulling the tarps off the lifeboats preparing to abandon ship, so to speak; I mean that I believe that the official prediction may be close to accurate. That alone would be worth writing about.
The accuracy is interesting only for the same reasons that any weather prediction is interesting — Did they get it right? And does this mean I should take future predictions really seriously?
There are several indications that they may be onto something this morning, most of which do not require their intervention because I have the tools at hand to understand and evaluate the probabilities all by my big-girl self.
On an ideal day, the hand would be pointing in the opposite direction.
First, the barometric pressure. It has been impressively low for the last 12 hours, if not more. Low pressure means high water, a rule so simple even I can remember it.
Checking the barometer is one of the first useful things to do, and this is what impressive low pressure looks like. Note that whoever put those generic terms on the instrument’s face (“fair,” “change,” “rain”) didn’t consider putting “impressive high water” in the lower right-hand space. But that’s okay, because depending on where you live they would more usefully have had to put “monsoon,” “tropical cyclone” and other events not likely to occur here. So never mind.
Second, the wind direction. The garbin (gar-BEAN) was blowing strongly from the southwest yesterday afternoon, which is good because it impels the water to move northeast, or out into the Adriatic where it can do whatever the heck it wants to. Then it veered around to the north — even better.
But now it has veered to a scirocco, or southeast wind, which has the opposite effect of pressing the water into the lagoon, as I rustically think of it — or at least of creating enough force to block the tide’s normal retreat.
Third, we are now on the verge of the 24-hour period of the “morto de aqua,” or “death of the water,” when the tidal variation is minimal. This 24-hour period falls twice a month and doesn’t particularly influence the height of the high tide, but it does mean that since the tides are not especially strong, the weather is almost always unstable. Which means don’t count on anything except some kind of unpleasant weather. In the summer we can get huge thunderstorms during the “morto de aqua.”
If I had a shop near the Piazza San Marco and didn’t know any of the above, instead of wailing to the city about paying me for the damage or inconvenience I had suffered, I ought to be paying them for my preposterous ignorance. Hm — that would be an entertaining project: Setting a scale of penalty payments for preposterous ignorance. The mind absolutely sparkles at the thought.
Fourth, if you don’t know any of the above three basic facts of life in the lagoon, you can decide to depend on the city’s system of warning sirens, which sound an hour before water is expected to start rising through the drain system. If you live more than an hour away from San Marco, of course, this system doesn’t do you much good.
Or you might go online and consult the prediction from the city’s Centro Maree, or Tide Center.
It’s interesting to see the variation between the normal tidal flux (the lower, light red line) and the real-time prediction (upper blue line). The only problem with this tool is that its usefulness depends heavily on being updated in a timely fashion.
The forecast hasn't changed since last night, but it would have been nice to have seen it before 7:28 AM.
Really timely updates are available through the text-messaging system. However, if you have signed up with the Tide Center to get the prediction via your cell phone, you still might want to consider a fall-back position. A few days ago the Gazzettino reported that thousands of users had indeed received the necessary warning, but only several hours too late. The city blamed the mobile phone company and its incapacity to send thousands of simultaneous text messages. (Oh good — something even less dependable than weather predictions: cell phone efficiency). The city has since — they say — changed companies.
I have not signed up with this service because, well, we’ve got the barometer, which is incapable of lying and doesn’t depend on any human agent whatsoever. What a scintillating thought that is.
Update: The sirens have just sounded. And instead of the two tones which “code orange” would require, there was only one tone, meaning the maximum ought to be a mere 110 cm (43 inches)above normal sea level, not the earlier prediction of 115 cm (45 inches). This doesn’t mean they were wrong, it just means that something changed. Whatever it was, I’m for it. Two inches makes an inordinate amount of difference..
It all seems (in fact, it all is) very long ago now, but last May 23 was the 36th edition of the annual rowing marathon called the Vogalonga.
The 2009 edition was fairly appalling, and if I were to feel like writing a full account I’d need a strip of paper five Babylonian cubits long, or whatever the electronic equivalent might be.
This year everything was perfect, so I didn’t have anything to write about. You know how they say bad news is more interesting than good news? (I guess somebody says that.) Same thing here. How many different ways can you say “It was great”?
But great or ghastly as the “Long Row” may be, each year the organizing committee gives each rower a numbered stub when he or she registers, then a few months later puts on a raffle and holds a drawing for the prizes.
As the drawing commences, it looks as if the boats themselves are waiting, like puppies in the pound, to find out who their new masters will be.
I dimly recall this event as occurring closer to the date of the Vogalonga itself, but for the past several years this convocation has been scheduled for late fall, when one’s memories of the equatorial heat and humidity, or whatever other weather dominated your spring morning in the lagoon, have been replaced by the sepulchral chill of an autumn twilight.
Thus we gathered last Friday night, in the waterside pavilion of the fish market at the Rialto, as usual, for the official thanking-of-many-brave-and-tireless collaborators, and for the drawing.
Venetian oars, like the forcolas, vary according to size and type of boat. These slender constructions suit the mascareta but would be too light and short for a gondola.
The prizes are pretty simple: Nine pairs of forcolas and nine pairs of oars, either pair suitable for rowing a Venetian mascareta. And two gleaming, brand-new mascaretas in the flesh.
One was financed by the Casino, a bittersweet reminder of the days not so long ago when the Casino had money to lavish on sponsorships all over the city, before their guy in the green eyeshade hit “total” and discovered they were 45 million euros ($52,356,493) in the red. And the other vessel was offered by the Assessorato al Turismo, or Tourism Department, similarly reduced, or so the reports have it, to eating shoe leather and tree bark to stay alive. I remember when there were three boats to be raffled off, but times are hard even in mascaretaland.
Here is how the event feels: I smile at an assortment of boating friends, (good); I feel the cold and damp seeping from the wet granite paving stones up through my shoes as the darkening air forms moisture everywhere around me (less good, but tolerable). And I metaphorically clamp an inverted facelock around the head of that inevitable craving that always lunges at me from when I see a boat that might, perhaps, in my dreams, be mine — that Christmas-morning suspense, but without any of the pleasure of knowing you’ll actually get to open the presents (not good at all.)
These forcolas may look merely like blunt instruments but they are works of exceptional engineering, traditionally made of a single piece of walnut.
So we walked around the boats, like everybody else was doing. We stood and listened to the various pronouncements made by Lalo Rosa Salva, chief organizer and tutelary deity of the Vogalonga. We watched the winners walking away with their prizes. I stifled my urge to wail.
And then there was the buffet. No event can ever be said to have occurred in life here if food is not in some way attached to it. Attached at the end of said event, naturally, otherwise people would just skip it and head directly to the noshfest, however modest it might be.
Because the Rosa Salva family runs one of the city’s oldest and best-known pastry-making and catering operations, there were sandwiches and cookies and wine and sodas and water galore.
The refreshments may not look like much to fight over, but you'd be surprised how strongly some people feel about getting as much as they want.
I remember when the buffet was somewhat more sumptuous — not that I’m complaining. But let the record show that I remember a generous assortment of sandwiches, and tiny finger-pizzas, and pastries as well as cookies, and also fruit. Those were buffets that had a certain allure, as attested by the variety of matrons who, in their instinctive, ruthless way, would appear from nowhere and always get to the table first, claiming their spot with more conviction than Columbus claiming North America, and not budging.
They’d stand there eating, elbows half-cocked to ward off any possible intruders, and I have even seen these dowagers stuff extra snacks into their conveniently large handbags. Or even shopping bags, brought for the occasion. Yes, I have seen that with these very eyes. The buffet has always, at least up to the other night, provided more drama than the drawing, because some ignorant or foolhardy person would occasionally try to displace one of these dreadnoughts. This year, though, the dowagers didn’t even show up. A sign more vivid than the shrinking prizes that times have indeed become hard. Pretty soon we’ll have to start stockpiling canned goods.
Oh, about the boats: I didn’t win one. But as I watched members of the two lucky clubs carry the mascaretas bodily to the Grand Canal, some perplexing thoughts seeped into my mind.
Such as: If Venetian rowers (by which I mean people, of whatever provenance, who row in the Venetian way) form the smallest possible percentage of participants, which they do (something like a quarter of the total) why are the prizes only suitable for Venetian rowing? Me, I think it’s just fine, and a brilliant way to stand firm for whatever can still be maintained of Venetian-ness. I merely note that for someone from Lithuania who rows a kayak, a forcola and an 11-foot [3.30 meters] wooden oar might not be exactly what they’d consider a prize. Of course they could sell it, but that would be crass.
Off and into the water, where she belongs.
And this: Why would either of the entities who paid for the two boats feel any particular need or desire to do so? Of course it’s a very handsome gesture, but if the main purpose is self-publicity — and I may have misinterpreted the reasoning — there must be items with more advertising throw-weight than two little boats which will only ever be seen here where everybody already knows about the Casino and the Tourism Department.
And this: I know raffles are intended to be, or to appear to be, composed of free gifts (i.e., gifts paid for by somebody other than the participants). But considering that each person pays a registration fee, technically you could say that the winner of oars or forcolas had already paid for them. But there I go, being crass.
Anyway, I didn’t win anything, so I don’t care. Now I think I’ll go buy a lottery ticket. Maybe my odds will improve and then I’ll be able to buy an entire boatyard all for myself.
This is the racing mascareta, maybe not my first choice for everyday tooling around town. But I would never turn it down.
For much of the year, you will almost certainly see people fishing right under the lee of the most beautiful city in the world. From Sant’ Elena to San Marco, plus other assorted spots along or in the lagoon, they’re out with a couple of poles and a whole batch of free time. Just now there are more than usual because we are in the period of the fraima[frah-EE-ma], when most of the fish are heading out to sea.
Depending on the time of year — obviously — these tenacious anglers might be hoping for seppie, or gilthead or sea bass or even grey mullet. Or whatever The Supreme Fish Deity decides to send swimming past their hooks, old boots and lost gloves excluded.
You can also expect to see people out in their boats, anchored where the tide is going to give them the biggest assist. Sometimes this perfect fishing spot will be just about in the center of the trajectory of cruise ships or large ferries heading to or from Greece. The captains blow their klaxons in a huffy sort of way. The fishermen are all deaf.
The subject of fish and the lagoon is one that I’m going to expand on some other time — probably many times. Meanwhile, though, I just want to alert you to the fact that there is a dedicated chunk of the male population — they’re always men, though sometimes the guys in the boats bring their wives, if the weather’s nice — who see the lagoon as a place where they might find something delectable to eat, or at least find some of their friends.
By “friends” I mean people they know. Fishermen have no friends; even if a person they’ve known since childhood, maybe even a relative, asks how’s the fishing, they’ll never say it’s good. They get all vague and crafty. Or if he’s obviously lugging home a miraculous catch, he’ll never say where he was. This is true everywhere on earth, and no less so here.
Two of my best moments so far involving fishing (as opposed to fish itself) relate to how Lino sees it. Briefly put, he doesn’t believe that anyone born after about 1960 — my ballpark date — knows anything about the lagoon or its inhabitants. I’m thinking he’s probably right.
I'm staying where the tide is best for me, and the big ships can just work around me. Or stay home. Or sink.
An example: We passed a young man one late summer night on the Lido — it was dark, but not terribly late — standing with his pole on the vaporetto dock, staring into the water, waiting. “He’s never going to catch anything,” Lino stated without even pausing. Why is that? “Because he’s trying to catch seppie, and that’s the wrong kind of gear. Also, the tide is going out. And they’re not in season right now.”
Second example: We have secretly adopted a man who spends a noticeable portion of his day at the vaporetto dock by the Giardini. The first time I noticed him, I was getting off the boat, and Lino was standing there a few discreet steps behind him, watching. They were both, in their own ways, engrossed.
“What’s he catching?” I asked in a whisper.
“Nothing,” Lino replied as we walked away. “He’s giving donations (opera dibeneficienza,or charity).” Excuse me?
“He’s been there for hours, rolling little balls of a grated cheese/breadcrumb mash, putting them on his hook and then waiting for his pole to twitch. After a little while he pulls it up, and the hook is empty. Even in an aquarium, fish don’t get fed this much.”
So what’s going wrong? Well, first of all, the guy is attaching the bait in such a way that it comes loose a few seconds after it goes under. The foodball just floats away, probably into the mouth of a big smiling fish. The man is up there imagining his hook as an enormous fatal concealed weapon, and the fish are seeing it as a fabulous food delivery system which requires no effort whatsoever on their part. They’re just down there floating around with their jaws open, saying “God, I haven’t eaten this much since Vernon’s bar mitzvah.”
The second thing that’s going wrong is that the guy hasn’t figured out any of this. He just keeps doing it. Lino can’t believe anybody over the age of two could be so persistent — so hopeful, so convinced — at something so futile. But the evidence is before us.
I look at it this way: The man is happy. The wife is happy because he’s out there and not sitting around the house or the bar. And of course the fish are happy. Happy fish, that’s what we want. Happy and bloated.
You can catch a mormora (striped sea bream) in the lagoon, but it's not likely you'd get all these. I just throw this in to give you an idea of the sort of thing the men might be dreaming of as they stare at the water.
