Tangible evidence of local severe drought

In the recent past, and I’m going back a few years, there have been several official declarations that all, most of or parts of North Carolina have experienced serious and even severe drought. The latter type (severe) usually were confined to small areas or, at most, areas consisting of only a few counties. 

But for the past few months, the whole state has been in some fashion of drought, and in the past couple weeks, the areas affected by severe drought have expanded to include a good portion of the state. 

Temperatures here have been in the 90s for most of the past two weeks, occasionally peaking at 100 or slightly above that. For the most part, oppressive humidity has kept pace, although there have been a few days when it hasn’t been as uncomfortable than most, but the actual difference has been minimal. But I guess when it’s really bad, any kind of break — even if slight — can be welcome.   

Cities in the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill have imposed various municipal water restrictions as a result of this. So far, those of us who live in unincorporated areas and derive our water from wells, haven’t been bound by restrictions and haven’t seen any consequences of not reducing our usage. 

At our home, we have never been reckless consumers of water to begin with, so I don’t think we need to feel guilty about what we do use, even if it’s not significantly less than usual. 

It wasn’t until about 10 days ago, on a visit to Wake County’s Yates Mill Pond Park, that I was able to detect tangible evidence of just how severe the drought is locally.   

It happened during my long walk when I saw the absence of water flowing over most of the waterfall that is adjacent to the old mill (see lead-off photo and first two photos below). On this day, the only water spilling over was a thin section of falls immediately next to the wheel (see first and second photos below). 

A few days later, when I was there again, even that thin section was dry, and the wheel stopped spinning. Plus, I saw no wildlife of any sort — specifically, turtles, geese, ducks and herons — as I almost always did on my walks there. 

And then just yesterday, June 17, I captured the series of pictures at the bottom of this post, beginning with the third one below — the dry shallow patches in the actual pond. There were two such patches plus a grossly expanded shoreline on the large (south) side of the pedestrian boardwalk, and one thin but long patch on the small (north) side. 

Added 8:20 a.m. June 19: Overnight since this post went live, remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur swept through North Carolina. The rain certainly was appreciated — and it is still falling as I compose this update — but the predicted final tally of up to an inch won’t be nearly enough to resolve the most serious of drought conditions by the time it is expected to stop before noon today.

Above and first two photos below: Two dry patches and an expanded shoreline on the large (south) portion of the pond. 

Above: The long, thin patch on the small (north) end of the pond. An observation area of the pedestrian boardwalk is on the far right. All of these patches are usually covered by water. 

Above: In an effort to end on an upbeat note, this shot taken Wednesday shows the corn crop in front of a North Carolina State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences building in the background that walkers in the park see while on the half-mile loop portion at the extreme west end of the two-mile creekside trail. On the downside, the yellowish grass in the foreground is another tell of the dry conditions.

Check out my traveling photographer blog, Travelin’ Shutterbug.

Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh

In historic Oakwood Cemetery’s 140 years of existence, it should not be surprising to learn that the grounds are the final resting place for 22,000 people, among them seven former governors, five U.S. senators, eight North Carolina Supreme Court justices and four Civil War generals. 

And, oh, it also is the resting place of North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano (see lead-off photo) and Lorenzo Charles, who scored the winning basket for Valvano’s NCAA championship team of 1983. Valvano died of cancer in 1993; Charles died in an accident while at the wheel of a 2011 tour bus in which he was the only occupant.

They are buried in the Cedar Hill section along Locust Avenue. (If you want to visit the cemetery and find certain graves, it’s best to determine whose graves you want to find, then search online for their burial section. Once in the cemetery, consult a section map the cemetery provides online.)   

In fact, Lorenzo Charles’ grave (see first photo below) is a very short distance — perhaps 15 yards — from that of his coach. In the second photo below, you can see Valvano’s monument in the foreground with Charles’ monument (look for the NCSU red colors) left of Valvano’s in the distance just below the ridge. 

Being a sports fan, my primary focus was finding the Valvano and Charles grave sits. I spent a good two hours roaming the cemetery and its perimeter; I have to note the latter because it was difficult to find an opening to the grounds. And then once inside, it took another long while on foot to find a way to reach the largest section of the cemetery. I could have taken far more pictures if I’d known the layout ahead of time, but alas, I foolishly did not scout such things beforehand.

Actually, I had a secondary (or primary?) purpose for heading to that part of the north Raleigh downtown fringe on Wednesday. I was hoping to do a photo profile of St. Augustine’s University, a former longtime degree-granting Historically Black College or University. 

That’s a story for a subsequent post, but for now, I’ll say that St. Augustine’s on-site operations have been shut down since going into bankruptcy, and private campus security would not grant me access to the interior campus. So the few campus shots I did make were taken from what I could access outside the school’s chain link fence surrounding the grounds along Oakwood Avenue.

Oakwood Cemetery covers 72 acres, 30 of which remain available for future graves, according to its website. Not surprisingly, it is part of the Oakwood Neighborhood, to which I was introduced recently when it turned out that one of my stately homes photographed while walking the Blount Street Historic District was just inside the Oakwood borders. 

I didn’t find the graves of any of the state Supreme Court justices or U.S. Senators, but I did come across the resting places of former Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock and former North Carolina Attorney General Bartholomew Figures Moore. And of the two, the monument for Moore (in the Battle Section) was far more extravagant (see first three photos below). 

Moore’s monument even contains a bust of the attorney general, often referred to as the “father of the North Carolina bar.” He is remembered for leading the legal team that compiled and revised the state’s statutes.

Aycock, whose monument is in the Beechwood Section and shown in the fourth photo below, today is a controversial figure in North Carolina history. He was championed for being “the education governor” because of his advocacy of improving public school education in North Carolina and for his post-gubernatorial travels promoting educational causes. 

But he had a reputation as a segregationist and has been singled out as the person most responsible for the horrific Wilmington Massacre, a November 1898 bloody municipal government coup in a city that had several African American political leaders. At the time, black residents also outnumbered white residents in North Carolina’s then-largest city. 

For the longest time, a statue of Aycock stood in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol Building as one of two honoring North Carolina notable citizens. In the early 2020s, amid the national Black Lives Matter movement, North Carolina replaced the statue with one of evangelist Rev. Billy Graham. 

And while I didn’t find any graves of specific military generals, I did find and photograph a section of the cemetery dedicated to the graves of Confederate Civil War soldiers. 

The remainder of my pictures were composed for landscape purposes, often focusing on interesting juxtaposition or collections of like monuments against open space or under trees. To view a full gallery of images from the shoot, follow the link in this sentence. 

Above and below: Photos of the Confederate Civil War dead in an (appropriately) southern section close to Oakwood Avenue. 

Check out my traveling photographer blog, Travelin’ Shutterbug.

Blue sky, blue heron, weird tree and root shapes and more at ... well, where else?

I hadn’t even planned on doing a post about one day’s worth of pictures when I went to Yates Mill Pond Park for a walk back on Jan. 5. But I was so taken by what I encountered in the forest there that day that I came back for three more picture outings in less than a week. 

So a dilemma struck me after yet another visit to Yates Mill on Jan. 17, when I started taking iPhone pictures because of compositions I was seeing thanks to a rich blue sky that then transformed into heavy clouds 15 minutes into my stroll. 

The question I struggled with afterward: Dare I create a fifth post of Yates Mill pictures in such a short time? I’d never done such a thing involving one specific locale, unless I had planned a series ahead of time. So, I figured now would be a good time to introduce another first here.

You can see the sky I was talking about in the leadoff photo, a sky complemented by some white clouds hovering over the primary pedestrian bridge over the pond. The clouds would thicken and concentrate in a very short time frame — I’d say within 15 minutes — after this photo was taken. 

The first half-dozen or so forest interior photos below I made early in my stroll, and as you can see, the quality of blue in the sky started to fade before going away entirely. I devoted the remainder of the shoot mostly to shape oddities I encountered, whether it was among the trees (dead or alive) along the path or on the path itself, usually because of the interesting above-ground root patterns.

Near the end, I strayed from the path to capture the “new” (well, new to this blog, anyway) building shots on the agricultural land owned by North Carolina State University (even though this land is far removed from the school’s actual campus). 

And at the very end, I spied the blue heron from a distance as I started my recession on the pedestrian bridge. The heron was in the same area of the small pond section shoreline where I had seen it on Jan. 11, and I was excited that maybe I could get close enough from the bridge to get a tight shot of it with my iPhone zoom without distorting the pixelation. 

But alas, as I reached the halfway point on the bridge, a man who had been fishing with a pole in the water on the opposite side of the bridge, turned around and cast his line into the small section, and that was enough to frighten the heron away. 

I really wasn’t able to reach the point I’d been hoping to reach to get sharp photos, but I took some anyway of the heron in flight. The penultimate picture below shows the heron just as it began its escape to the far north end of the pond. The last shot was taken just as it was landing. I took a few shots afterward as it waded in the shallow water, but it was too far away to secure sharpness. 

To view a full gallery of images from this shoot, follow the link in this sentence.     

Above and first two photos below: Three perspectives of the same tree.