5:07 am Monday morning. Entertained myself till 3 am reading Life Magazine’s latest “Nature’s Fury” issue : the illustrated history of wild weather & natural disasters. Thus continues my Spring Romance with atmospheric sciences, especially anything skywards. The first flirt was in January, after mild rains over the dunes of Nipomo – technically at Santa Maria Guadelupe, a few hours north of Santa Barbara. Driving south in the passenger’s side of a cruising car, my gaze was fixed vertically for at least an hour’s stretch. Somewhere, in some half finished notebook live several lines of scrawl about the ethereal duotone halos playing off the misty edges of impressive and shockingly white cumulonimbus clouds – which at the time I would merely identify as huge, puffy, they-of-the-giant-cottonball variety….Quickly this romp passed into a more serious attraction while reading a most lovely book by the founding member of the Cloud Appreciation Society appropriately titled “The Cloudspotter’s Guide : The Science, HIstory, and Culture of Clouds”…. Between the covers of Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s book is where the Morning Glory cloud’s magnificence first aroused this humble reader, and I have, shall we say, been swept away and remain so, in the clouds, until this very moment. A copy of “Clouds and Weather, the concise field guide to the atmosphere” has since, whet my appetite, as have odds and ends pertaining to the elusive circle rainbow, but my craving for a first edition of the Cloud Atlas published by the cloud explorer par excellence, Abercroby, Hon, Ralph, remains unsatisfied. If only I could gaze at some cirus right now while laying in the warm rays, I would not be biding my time until sleep, but rather enjoying a show of those lazy curls that split upon my fancy tongue, like so many h-airs.
Tonight’s dive into “wild weather” fed me the following bits of intrigue:
To qualify as a blizzard, a storm must sustain winds of 35 miles per hour for at least three hours straight, and falling or blowing snow must decrease visibility to a quarter mile. These violent conditions, hardly fit for man or beast, beset our country in lethal fashion not once but twice in 1888.
I thank these blizzards for their choice of names, which will come in handy as I try drifting (or drafting) into dreamtime with dawn’s whisper….they were, in chronological order, The Schoolhouse Blizzard, and The Great White Hurricane. And before I depart for the white down of my pillows, a most awful fact which bore a beautiful phrase….In 1889 the Johnstown Flood, which began in Cambria, PA, struck on the afternoon of May 31, and some 20 million tons of water “poured forth” and headed toward the city…Above the black wave, there was a swirl of spray that looked like smoke and would be forever remembered in the city as…… “the death mist”.
