Celebrating Green

Green Creek Festival

We spent part of Saturday enjoying the Green Creek Heritage Festival down Highway 9 a ways. Lots of pickin' and singin', a kid's tractor pull, a Fireman's Barrel Roll, and lots of food and crafts.
Several volunteer fire departments participated in the barrel roll, aiming their high pressure hoses at an empty barrel in an effort to push it across the other department's goal line. We stayed dry.
There was a sandbox full of corn for the kids to play in, a car show, farm equipment displays and lots of other stuff. My little camera didn't record the music but you can hear the Boys here. They play regularly at the City Grill in Saluda which is more commonly known as the Truck Stop. They are one of dozens of Gospel Blue Grass groups around here. Almost any week one of the 83 churches in Polk County will have a signing. A group comes in to perform for the folks.

Green Creek used to be called Green's Creek because it was named after the creek that ran through the property of William Henry Green. Uncle Billy came to Polk County before it was a county, in 1760. Now the little phone books in Polk and Rutherford County towns and across the line in South Carolina have dozens and dozens of Greens or Greenes. Some people in the same family spell that last name one way while other family members spell it the other. The cemeteries here are mostly on church grounds and there's many a Green planted in them.

Suffering Nicaragua

Nicaragua has played a large role in my life. So it is sad to read about how the Nicas are suffering again. I spent many, many weeks there over the years, reporting on Nicaraguan politics, disasters, triumphs and dreams. I opened an office there while director of the Latin American Journalism Program, spent four years training Nicaraguan journalists after the first Sandinista government was voted out of office. I baby-sat Howard Hughes when he was ensconced on the top floor of the Intercontinental Hotel, the pyramid shaped hostel that was a temporary home to hundreds of foreign correspondents, diplomats, spies and assorted other ner'do-wells a three decades ago.

So I know a lot about the country, really like its people and recall fondly my Nicaraguan friends. It always makes me sad when bad things happen to the Nicas. And bad things seem to happen to them often. The latest is Hurricane Felix.
The hurricane hit the Miskito coast, an area called the RAAN or the North Atlantic Autonomous Region, where poverty is extreme, infrastructure is weak and communication is difficult. La Prensa in Managua was reporting 168 deaths. The paper said the death toll may be much higher but authorities won't know until they contact all the small fishing villages on the coast.

Managua itself was destroyed and thousands killed in an earthquake in 1972. The epicenter was right under the city. Howard Hughes scooted out of the Intercontinental Hotel to the airport and despite the fact it was closed ordered his plane into the air. Howard wanted out of there as fast as possible.

Then came the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega, which ruined what was left of the country's economy. Now Ortega has been reelected. In a speech celebrating the 28th anniversary of the army the Sandinistas founded he called Nicaraguan reporters "children of Goebbels" and accused them of spreading lies about his government abroad. Sounds like the 1980s all over again.

Sergio Ramirez served as vice president in Ortega's first government, then split with him and formed another wing of the Sandinista party. Ramirez was one of the "group of 12" Nicaraguan inellectuals, clerics and businessmen who broke with Anastasio Somoza to support the Sandinistas when they were trying to overthrow Somoza. Ramirez writes about the party's current status in this article.


Hurricane Felix calls to mind Hurricane Fifi about this same time 33 years ago. Fifi killed at least 8,000 people in Honduras Sept. 18-19, 1974. Most were drowned or buried in mud slides. It took Honduras several years to recover. The storm destroyed 80 percent of the 1974 banana crop. Most of the Honduran fishing fleet and the main facilities of Puerto Cortes, the most important port, were destroyed. Flooding from the storm drowned two-fifths of the country's cattle. The total damage, estimated to be about $900 million, was horrible for Honduras.

American Plot

There are people in Central America even today who are convinced the United States made Fifi a deadly storm. Their theory is that Storm Fury -- American experiments in seeding hurricanes -- made Fifi increase in strength and forward speed so that it hit Central America an unexpected blow. The United States experimented with dropping silver iodide into the storms on the theory this would shrink the eye. Cuba and Mexico complained. Here is text from a Nov. 4, 2001 CNN broadcast in which Correspondent John Zarrella interviewed Max Sheets, then director of Storm Fury. Sheets later became director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

ZARRELLA: But Storm Fury also had critics. The government of Mexico charged that tempering with hurricanes would deprive Mexican agriculture of rain. Fidel Castro fueled anti-American sentiment with accusations that Storm Fury would divert hurricanes into Cuba. And when Hurricane Fifi hit Honduras, there was immediate suspicion that American research was to blame, a charge that was laid to rest.

SHEETS: Fortunately for us, in 1974, when Fifi occurred, we did no flying into hurricanes, period. "

That full broadcast, which had some very interesting predictions about New Orleans flooding, is here.