California is crammed with the spectacular, the weird, the outrageous and the beautiful. But when, for the sixty-first day in a row, the weatherman says “tomorrow will be a gorgeous day,” I know we’re in for another boringly blue and empty sky.
Not so, Texas.
Above the flat and unimaginative land, the cloud performance varies over dramatically short timeframes.
- An afternoon of whisps so vague that they change the sky from blue to aqua to mauve to purple with such subtlety that it’s impossible to pinpoint where the change occurs.
2. An unobstructed wind holds the ubiquitous flags as rigid and horizontal as the ubiquitous billboards. It stretches the clouds into threads.
3. Morning thunder, distant but approaching. Peal follows fast after peal. Gray pillows are heaped upon each other overhead, solid to the south, east and west. They stop to the north with a boundary as clean and sharp as if sliced by a scalpel.
4. Twelve minutes after observation # 3 above, a lightning flash, then torrential downpour. Rain so powerful it sounds like hail. It firehoses straight out from the downspout. Lakes materialize in minutes on the street.
5. Driving north to Fort Worth on the day described in 3 and 4, the sky is an ocean collapsing onto the freeway. The wipers are on turbo-overdrive, but the vehicle in front of me and another in my mirror are just blurred shadows, like sharks prowling at the edge of underwater vision.
6. After a rain. Night. There’s a partial moon up there somewhere, hidden behind clouds that have broken apart into faint ghosts the same color as the sky between them.
7. After a downpour and lightning, bolls of cotton clump overhead, polka-dotting the blue sky. But approaching the horizon, the white puffs develop gray underbellies, and beyond, they fuse into striations of gray down to the horizon.
8. A day where, above me is an M.C. Escher scene of cloud ships lazy in a Caribbean sky.
9. A day of feeble drizzles has morphed, by late afternoon, into sunny and heating up. It ends with two separate clouds in the west. The first is a curtain from sky to horizon, glowing yellow-orange as the sun descends in front of it. The face of the sun is eclipsed by the second – an elongated stretch of dark blue lumpiness that is darkening into gray. Reminds me of a fart trailing from some diesel truck with a worn-out engine.
10. Blue Norther. A quasi-mythical entity I’ve heard of a few times over the years. It’s unique to Texas and named as if it were a phrase from Cowboy Poetry. Yesterday it was sunny, 85 degrees, breezy and humid. Did a few things outdoors and was beaded with sweat. Back indoors, perspiration oozed over my whole body. Skin sticky like chewed bubblegum. Ultimately, I broke down and turned on the A / C.
This morning, dawn brought light with a deep grey filter and no visible sun. Stepped outside into gusting wind so cold I went in for my down parka. Wind was now coming from the north, 180 degrees from yesterday. Thermometer at 45. Mashed together clouds of dark blue filled the sky.
Went out to hunt wildflowers. Periodic bursts of rain, no sun, no warming up. Fields of early Spring flowers, but not a single bee. In the evening, lumpy clouds the color of bruises were still bunched together overhead. To the south, where Gulf of Mexico air pushes in, the northern clouds were turning into streaks that curved from horizontal toward the land as if someone had pulled a comb thru the clouds with one big curving sweep.
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