BOTTOM DWELLERS IN A SEA OF AIR

On my “guides to” shelf, next to the ones about flowers, birds, mammals, or trees are a couple of guides to clouds.  The sheet of stamps about clouds pictured above is tucked into the pages of one of them so I can use it for a bookmark, but sometimes I just take it out to look at it closely.  

This time of year the big picture window in my kitchen, the one that faces east, is a skyshow.  Of course, in Montana every day outdoors is a skyscape, a great theatre of extraterrestrial forces.   Water vapor under the influence of temperature, wind, and light is a fabulous medium for sculpture.  Look, a bunny!  Look, Julius Caesar!  Eastward is the prairie, a long descending decline towards the Mississippi River which drained what was once a shallow inland sea.  That was an inconceivably long time ago.  What I see every day in spring is the winter’s moisture, locked into ice for months, now rising from land heated by the longer and more direct energy from the sun.  It builds into massive cumuli, looking solid as marble palaces.  At first the bottoms are relatively pale, but as the snow melts the bottoms turn darker and darker until they are purple and sail like dark-hulled ships with small dark tenders in front of them.

This morning was an ebbtide dawn on a long sand beach, the darker strata of cloud making narrow strips between the shining lagoons and tide pools of light -- all without much color, just black and white photography of exquisite resolution.   Other mornings the eastern sky is a riot of color, a bed of sea anemones in coral, lemon, and even lime, but that’s mostly after the fields are being burned so that smoke filters the light.  Much of the attention to the sky comes from the wish to predict the weather so as to plan things like field burning.  Every summer someone miscalculates so that the fire runs away, leaving black patches at the least and possibly burning a structure.  The planet wants to burn, wants the volatile oxygen to make living things into carbon.

In winter the clouds are frozen, dropping to the ground as snow.  In spring the clouds are frozen, the snow starting to drop, but meeting updrafts from the warming earth and rising again, but freezing again and rising again and freezing again, until it is pellets of hail or even jagged chunks of ice capable of crashing through canopies and patio covers, pounding dents into cars, and even killing chickens.  But that’s a little later, more like June.

In the nineteenth century when it seemed every man of leisure was caught up in the task of sorting and naming natural phenomena, the clouds did not escape and the names devised then by Luke Howard, a quiet young Quaker, have prevailed over many more inventive and fantastic ideas.  His breakthrough realization came from simply being observant and reflective.  Instead of letting his imagination run away with fantastic metaphors or on the other hand simply assuming all the clouds were up there in the sky like bumper cars at a carnival, all sliding around on some ethereal plane of glass, he observed that they passed in front of each other and that the shapes could be divided into categories.  

Then the balloonists began to realize that the sky is in layers, each with its own characteristics and behaviors.  Height breaks clouds into four families. A are high clouds, having a lower level of 20,000 feet above the ground. B are middle clouds with a base of 6,500 feet, C are low clouds with a base near the Earth’s surface, D are clouds of vertical development, having an average lower level of 1,500 feet and an upper level of high clouds.  Bicoastal commuters far above the clouds see how high those cumulus thunderheads can tower.  Those who winter on the prairie know how the January overcast can practically rest on the housetops.  

In spring and fall, the skies are complex: high ice putting a ring around the sun even as wind grinds lower clouds into lenses like flying saucers at the same time that in between a Chinook wind arch forms to the west where the jet stream (Airliners love to hitch a ride on that!  What a fuel saver!) pushes everything back to reveal a blue hem of sky.  And then we see a “storm shelf” (in winter a snow shelf, in summer a rain shelf) of clouds like a second range of mountains rising on the shoulders of the Rockies, waiting to drop enough watery weight to cross over.

For some reason I haven’t  figured out yet, there is often a break in the overcast on the eastern horizon, so that there is a dawn interval of sun when the cats sit together in the east window to watch the birds begin to move around.  Sometimes it is on the western horizon so a warm sunset gleam shoots light low across my front room, falling across my book and dazzling my eyes.

Some of the air wants to rise and some of the air wants to sink.  The collision is electrical, literally, and the friction makes thunder and lightning that recharges the prairie with nitrogen.  In the early days the lightning strike fires mixed with those set by Blackfeet and some say that’s how they got their name: walking across the charred grass before the new shoots came up through it.  They expressed their deep respect for lightning with Thunder Pipe Bundle ceremonies which gather the spirits of animals to protect their tipi poles from becoming lightning rods.

People who fuss all the time about possible contradictions between science and religion, assigning one to the left brain and the other to the right brain, would do well to consider using their eyes and skins and ears to participate in the universe by awareness of the skies, an ocean of air in which we are bottom-dwellers.  Temperature, humidity, wind and electricity are parts of our own bodies and we react as much as any other creatures.  Even our hair responds to the weather.  Both God and electricity can make your hair stand on end.