Weather happens, whether you like it or not

My wife was raised in Havelock. She is fond of telling stories about the weather here when she was a child. She tells of late December days so cold that even the kids did not venture outside.

Yet a few days later on a Christmas Day, she recollects, she was outside riding her new bike in shorts and flip-flops.

"If you don’t like eastern North Carolina weather," she tells me, "wait a day or two and it will change."

She is right. Sunday, it was 70 degrees.

The windows of the garage were fogged up with outside moisture due to the garage being at least 25 degrees cooler inside than it was outside. The garage hadn’t warmed up yet from the freezing days of last week, reminiscent of those stories of my wife’s youth.

It was 17 degrees as I left for work on Jan. 11, according my car’s thermometer.

I noted the temperature because I’m a Yankee, and 17 degrees is more like those January temperatures I grew up with in northern Ohio than those temperatures usual for eastern North Carolina.

In fact, it was cold enough on Jan. 11 for locals who know the story to exclaim, "It’s as cold as the night the Crissie Wright went ashore!"

As it turned out, Jan. 11 is the same day the Crissie Wright went ashore 124 years ago on Jan. 11, 1886.

It is said that Crissie Wright was a beautiful ship, an 800-ton, three-masted "tern" ("tern" defined as a "set of three") schooner launched July 11, 1874, in Bridgeton, N.J. She set sail from Baltimore on Dec. 31, 1885, with a load of fertilizer (it was actually guano) on her way to Savannah, Ga.

She entered the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean from the Chesapeake Bay and was off the treacherous coast of North Carolina — the Graveyard of the Atlantic — on Jan. 11, 1886, when the weather quickly turned. A coming winter storm would become deadly for the crew of the Crissie Wright.

According to legend (there are no known official investigations of the shipwreck), the Crissie Wright lost her rudder and the schooner’s captain, Thomas Clark, took refuge in the Cape Lookout bight, anchoring off Shackleford Banks to wait out the coming storm.

The weather turned so quickly however, as is customary in eastern North Carolina, that no crewmember could get off the ship before the temperature dropped below 20 degrees.

Except for the ship’s cook, all crewmembers drowned or froze to death in the bitterly cold gale that blew the night.

According to Sally Moore, author of "They Watched the Crissie Wright Go Down," the ship ran aground near Moore’s Landing just off Shackleford Banks.

"As the men struggled to repair a damaged rudder while waiting for high tide to float them free of the sandbar, a fierce northeast gale blew in, dropping the temperature from near 70 degrees to below freezing in less than an hour. The crew, already soaked from working on the rudder, scrambled on board and sought what refuge they could find, some wrapping themselves in the mainsail and lashing themselves to one another.

"As the night went on and the conditions worsened, the men became unconscious, (some) falling into the icy water as frustrated would-be rescuers watched from the beach. Finally, at 4:30 the next afternoon, the weather broke and rescuers were able to reach the battered ship."

According to writings from "Our Shared Past" prepared for the Diamond City & Ca’e Bankers Reunion, August 1999 by Grayden and Mary Paul (© 1995 Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and retrieved from www.downeasttour.com/diamond/crissie-wreck.htm), after boarding the battered remains of the Crissie Wright, the rescuers from the bankers village of Wades Shore "saw a big bulge in the jib sail where they discovered four men wrapped together in the canvass. Three of them were frozen stiff, but the man underneath, covered by the other three, showed some signs of life. This was the ship’s cook, Robert Johnson, the lone survivor."

Johnson never really recovered from his ordeal and died a year later.

As a Yankee, I took notice of all the complaints of the cold I heard last week from locals. While I never heard it exclaimed that it was as "cold as the night the Crissie Wright went ashore," I’m certain it was indeed very cold.

But as cold as it was, I’m just as certain it wasn’t as cold on Jan. 11, 2010, as the deadly cold the crew of the Crissie Wright experienced on that horrible night of Jan. 11, 1886.

Barry Fetzer is a retired Marine whose column appears here every other week. He can be reached at fetzerab@ec.rr.com.