Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the weather
is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity.
When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are on the
levels, sea or sand or plains. There you get only a hint of what is
about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place
under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no stay
nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind have
the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted
grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill
countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure the
pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars,
and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no
harm.
They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings,
and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds
his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water,
and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty
years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the
piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and
the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither the
water nor the snow.
The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention in
storm processes.
Weather does not happen. It is the visible manifestation of the Spirit
moving itself in the void. It gathers itself together under the heavens;
rains, snows, yearns mightily in wind, smiles; and the Weather Bureau,
situated advantageously for that very business, taps the record on his
instruments and going out on the streets denies his God, not having
gathered the sense of what he has seen. Hardly anybody takes account of
the fact that John Muir, who knows more of mountain storms than any
other, is a devout man.
Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered peaks
about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or the short,
wide-mouthed cañons opening eastward on high valleys. Days when the
hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds come walking on
the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly
white above. They gather flock-wise, moving on the level currents that
roll about the peaks, lock hands and settle with the cooler air, drawing
a veil about those places where they do their work. If their meeting or
parting takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets the
splendor of the apocalypse. There will be cloud pillars miles high,
snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective before the
unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of clouds that dance to
some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it day or night, once they
have settled to their work, one sees from the valley only the blank wall
of their tents stretched along the ranges. To get the real effect of a
mountain storm you must be inside.
One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What if it
should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual
thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose that if you took
any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against
showers. Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like
the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how
many grow in copse shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight
in the quick showers of summer cañons, with the added comfort, born of
experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the cañon wall,
slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your
sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and beat
down the mimulus beside the brook. You shelter on the lee of some strong
pine with shut-winged butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures of the
wood. Runnels of rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the
pine needles into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks.
The sky is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is
clear. The summer showers leave no wake.
Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.
Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the lake
gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly.
Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather--grown headland to
watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. Out over meadow or lake region
begins a little darkling of the sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a
smokiness such as spirits materialize from in witch stories.
It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret cañons. Rain
begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and
drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the
glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storms
that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and the play of
live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds that try the pines
for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit. They shake down
avalanches of splinters from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden
floods like battle fronts in the cañons against towns, trees, and
boulders. They would be kind if they could, but have more important
matters. Such storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not
rain, rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After
such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles away is
white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.
All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in the
geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I remember one
night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry
of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under a
slide of broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge. We had heard the
heavy denotation of the slide about the hour of the alpenglow, a pale
rosy interval in a darkling air, and judged he must have come from
hunting to the ruined cliff and paced the night out before it, crying a
very human woe. I remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake
made milky white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed
into it by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly up,
stunned by the shock of the sudden flood. But there were trout enough
for what was left of the lake next year and the beginning of a meadow
about its upper rim. What taxed me most in the wreck of one of my
favorite cañons by cloudburst was to see a bobcat mother mouthing her
drowned kittens in the ruined lair built in the wash, far above the
limit of accustomed waters, but not far enough for the unexpected. After
a time you get the point of view of gods about these things to save you
from being too pitiful.
The great snows that come at the beginning of winter, before there is
yet any snow except the perpetual high banks, are best worth while to
watch. These come often before the late bloomers are gone and while the
migratory birds are still in the piney woods. Down in the valley you see
little but the flocking of blackbirds in the streets, or the low flight
of mallards over the tulares, and the gathering of clouds behind
Williamson. First there is a waiting stillness in the wood; the
pine-trees creak although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs
rock by the water borders. The noise of the creek rises insistently and
falls off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the
room. This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes of
the sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes. After it runs
a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their holes.
Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days with increasing
stillness. Only Clark's crow and the strident jays make light of it;
only they can afford to. The cattle get down to the foothills and ground
inhabiting creatures make fast their doors. It grows chill, blind clouds
fumble in the cañons; there will be a roll of thunder, perhaps, or a
flurry of rain, but mostly the snow is born in the air with quietness
and the sense of strong white pinions softly stirred. It increases, is
wet and clogging, and makes a white night of midday.
There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain, but later,
when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the slopes, the
drifts begin. The late snows are fine and dry, mere ice granules at the
wind's will. Keen mornings after a storm they are blown out in wreaths
and banners from the high ridges sifting into the cañons.
Once in a year or so we have a "big snow." The cloud tents are widened
out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two and are drawn
tight against the sun. Such a storm begins warm, with a dry white mist
that fills and fills between the ridges, and the air is thick with
formless groaning. Now for days you get no hint of the neighboring
ranges until the snows begin to lighten and some shouldering peak lifts
through a rent. Mornings after the heavy snows are steely blue,
two-edged with cold, divinely fresh and still, and these are times to go
up to the pine borders. There you may find floundering in the unstable
drifts "tainted wethers" of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger;
easy prey. Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and
once we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.
No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver fir. The
star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft wreaths--droop
and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point of overloading is
reached, there is a soft sough and muffled dropping, the boughs recover,
and the weighting goes on until the drifts have reached the midmost
whorls and covered up the branches. When the snows are particularly wet
and heavy they spread over the young firs in green-ribbed tents wherein
harbor winter loving birds.
All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent. East and
east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges, desertward, and
no rain breaks over them, except from some far-strayed cloud or roving
wind from the California Gulf, and these only in winter. In summer the
sky travails with thunderings and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a
few blistering big drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a
torrent. But you have not known what force resides in the mindless
things until you have known a desert wind. One expects it at the turn of
the two seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves. Along the
edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley, dust devils begin to
rise white and steady, fanning out at the top like the genii out of the
Fisherman's bottle. One supposes the Indians might have learned the use
of smoke signals from these dust pillars as they learn most things
direct from the tutelage of the earth. The air begins to move fluently,
blowing hot and cold between the ranges. Far south rises a murk of sand
against the sky; it grows, the wind shakes itself, and has a smell of
earth. The cloud of small dust takes on the color of gold and shuts out
the neighborhood, the push of the wind is unsparing. Only man of all
folk is foolish enough to stir abroad in it. But being in a house is
really much worse; no relief from the dust, and a great fear of the
creaking timbers. There is no looking ahead in such a wind, and the bite
of the small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener than any insect sting.
One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind wears one to the point of
exhaustion very soon, but there is dread, in open sand stretches
sometimes justified, of being over blown by the drift. It is hot, dry,
fretful work, but by going along the ground with the wind behind, one
may come upon strange things in its tumultuous privacy. I like these
truces of wind and heat that the desert makes, otherwise I do not know
how I should come by so many acquaintances with furtive folk. I like to
see hawks sitting daunted in shallow holes, not daring to spread a
feather, and doves in a row by the prickle bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
turned tail to the wind in a patient doze. I like the smother of sand
among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open places, but I
never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep. The wind robs them of
what wit they had, and they seem never to have learned the self-induced
hypnotic stupor with which most wild things endure weather stress. I
have never heard that the desert winds brought harm to any other than
the wandering shepherds and their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little
Pete showed me bones sticking out of the sand where a flock of two
hundred had been smothered in a bygone wind. In many places the
four-foot posts of a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown
dunes.
It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch the cloud
currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge, say, you look over
Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on the level desert air;
south of you hurries a white troop late to some gathering of their kind
at the back of Oppapago; nosing the foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps
south. In the clean, smooth paths of the middle sky and highest up in
air, drift, unshepherded, small flocks ranging contrarily. You will find
the proper names of these things in the reports of the Weather
Bureau--cirrus, cumulus, and the like--and charts that will teach by
study when to sow and take up crops. It is astonishing the trouble men
will be at to find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze over the
eternal meaning of the skies. You have to beat out for yourself many
mornings on the windly headlands the sense of the fact that you get the
same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden
hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.