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The Elders SpeakOn Weather Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it. Quiet seemed in tune with the wind that haunted the high places like a hymn, and I felt as though I constantly walked in an atmospheric cathedral. The provocative landscape and overwhelming skyscapes stirred my emotion into a spiritual experience and wherever I looked there was a meaningful picture to be painted. It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. Good novelists never leave the weather out. We have always a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types in this blue ground. And the inquiring may always read a new truth. [Weather] can be a shattering force of ruin and desolation. But it can also be a patch of soft spring sky, a pattering of rain on thirsty leaves, a witchery of fog across the hills, a silence of snow over the city. The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you... The weather belongs to us all, it doesn't cost us anything, and it's about the one of the few possessions we can afford. Last night in my tent I listened to the rain. At first it came down gently, then in a steady drumming downpour, and I lay there wondering when I would begin to feel the first rivulets creeping beneath my sleeping bag. From beneath [the clouds] were generally flat, but from above they were elegantly if randomly sculptured. What seemed like tiny puffballs from the ground were big masses of fog in person. ...the sun's slanting rays pierced mortally the sullen bank of cloud that lingered in its flight; and a rainbow, spirit of all the colours that adorned the earth and sky, spanned the whole arch with its triumphant glory. [The aurora's serpentine motions]...were like a tai-chi exercise: graceful, inward turning and, protracted. To tell you the truth, in California I missed the wildness of the Canadian winter. There is something stirring about a blizzard, something elemental about pitting oneself against driving, stinging snow in below zero temperatures. The United States is a melting pot of weather; like your people, each weather pattern is in that typical qll-American hurry. Instead of rainy seasons and other programmed European climate, there are sudden American sky surprises with fast-forming clouds to match. At no other time of the year is the movement of the invisible air so apparent as in the white months of winter. We see it recorded in blowing clouds of surface flakes, in solidified ripples and waves, in sweeping lines and in the streamlining of the drifting snow. ...there is built out horizontally on the north side of every twig and other surfaces a very remarkable sort of hoar frost, the crystallized fog, which is still increasing... Heat and cold chase one another like pups playing — yesterday ovenish, today cold storage. Oh, perfect in the pauses when the wind forgets and the sun remembers! Fog against the windows, like milk. No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors. I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate. We wanted a sunset too, and that meant wisps of clouds and possibly a thunderhead for grandeur. All this talk…gets me to thinking about the weather and I wonder what we would do without it.
Cumulus nurslings emerge from their hot-air eggs over warm field and towns often only to blow along on the wind for a few minutes to cooler regions, where mixing with drier air, they fade and die. Tell me a story of the sky. Living with the skies and knowing what they were up to was once one of the joys of living. I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind -- the dim, hardly made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air. [Snowflakes] are about a tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fernlike, with a distinct straight and slender midrib, raying from the center... Frost flowers are wildings, outdoor growths created by humidity in the starlight...Pure ice crystals, they look like tufts of snowy feathers. Frost flowers, like hoar frost, are fragile. The clouds are handsome this afternoon. When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure. Know the signs of the sky and you will far the happier be. If different qualities of air had different colors, the sky could look like the writhing flow of colored lights in those old-fashioned juke boxes, never quiet, always mixing. The rain has ended in a whimper. In Visdal valley the wind thunders ahead with a renewed vigour. But the clouds have been torn apart and show blue windows. The earth is soaked and soggy with rain....The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual! My moment of keenest satisfaction and most complete mental piece have been those when the grandeur of nature's artistry has cast its spell over me. A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness, it rolls a bank of fog across the wild morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier, the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon. The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it. Whether it is raining or snowing, the weather is never so bad outside as it looks through a living room window. Learn More From These Relevant Books
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