"Look Up and Wonder"

Earlier this week, the sun vanished. It was up there, of course, but only rarely broke through. Thick cloud cover kept light flat and made the hour of day tough to discern.

Which for me raised the question: were the skies cloudy or overcast? And is there a difference? One reference I consulted suggests there isn’t. It defined cloudy as “full of clouds, overcast,” and overcast as, so you might’ve guessed, “full of clouds, cloudy.” Elsewhere, sky descriptions from the National Weather Service Directive ranked with percentages the amount of opaque cloud cover. Cloudy skies are 88 to 100% blanketed, the same percentages, it says, that define overcast. More helpful, perhaps, is the simpler notation that overcast is when almost all of the sky is covered, and, without any cloud-break or individual cloud differentiation, is a dull, matte without-shadows-gray. Just what outdoor photographers fear most. Or what, for some folks, makes gloomy moods tougher to lift.

For me, what’s most objectionable in an overcast sky is not the clouds but the seeming lack of them. What’s overhead doesn’t appear to be the massed clotting of clouds that makes individual clouds indistinguishable but a thick impenetrable shield that blocks from sight whatever is going on up there.

Sure, it’s hard not to root for sunny days and bright skies. But to my way of looking, a blue and cloudless sky can be as uninteresting as an occluded overcast one. Which may make me a candidate for membership in the Cloud Appreciation Society. With its motto of “Look Up and Wonder,” the Society believes clouds have been “unjustly maligned.” It pledges to fight the tyranny of “blue-sky thinking” and warns of “cloudless monotony.” More succinctly, its website declares: “we love clouds and have had enough of people moaning about them.” It’s easy to see why their favorite aphorism may well be re-jiggered into: every silver lining has its cloud.

The Society’s founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, is an unabashed cloud-spotter. He’s also the author of The Cloudspotters Guide, an unlikely best-seller when published in Great Britain in 2007. Not bad for a chap with no meteorological training. And who depicts clouds as those ephemeral wonders “magicked into being” by the planet’s constantly changing atmosphere.

His newest effort, the recently published The Cloud Collectors Handbook, is no mere atlas but a full-color, heavy on photographs and easy on technological text guide. In short, a field guide to clouds. Its aim: teach readers and laymen observers how to differentiate and identify clouds and record their sightings, much as birders create their life lists. There’s even a scoring system. For “ordinary” clouds like nimbostratus, or what most folks think of as featureless rain clouds, cloudspotters earn ten points. Ratcheting up to 40 are cumulo-nimbus storm clouds, the anvil-shaped “king of clouds.”  The granddaddy of point-getters may well be Australia’s Morning Glory clouds that in some manifestations are likened to huge rolls of white meringue and appear to be the collision of opposing air currents, a phenomenon that can’t be fully explained.

 “You might well think that cloud collecting sounds like a ridiculous idea,” admits Pretor-Pinney in a recent New York Times article. But, he notes, you don’t have to possess something to collect it. “You just have to notice it and record it.” Assisting would-be cloud collectors is a chart showing how meteorologists classify clouds by genus, species and variety, the way biologists classify flora and fauna – for those among us who, for example, prefer Antirrhinum majus over common snapdragon.

But is such naming and identifying always a good thing? I, too, love field guides and always have, finding within their pages of description the precise names that seem almost a type of reward for paying attention, closely observing. But I’m also reminded of what essayist Barbara Hurd once observed: “field guides can perpetuate the delusion that once you’ve named a thing you know what it is.”

And who among us can truly know clouds? Astrologists and meteorologists likely come closest – at least in how clouds form and why, or what they’re made of and why they take such shapes. For the majority of us, however, we may well fall into the ranks that, and though perhaps for different reasons, propelled Victorian art critic and essayist John Ruskin to declare: “it is strange how little in general people know about the sky.”

Certainly we don’t need names to celebrate and praise. In the midst of a crushing drought, no identifying names are needed for the massing of rain clouds on the horizon. In those fleeting moments when unidentifiable cloud-break enables sunlight to briefly fracture into perfect rays and beams, the only name my sister needs is “miracle light,” the attempted duplication of which movie directors like Cecil B. DeMille once used to good advantage in big screen blockbusters. A few years ago, I possessed no name for the black wall of threatening clouds advancing over the Bay even though it was the only sign heralding an impending microburst about to uproot five huge spruce trees against my house, an occasion I did not celebrate but had to hold in awe – the might of storms such clouds possess and portend.

Clouds, says Pretor-Pinney, are egalitarian, universal. Nearly everyone the world over has a view of them. Indeed, as they sail overhead, casting fleeting shadows as the wind sweeps them past, it’s hard not to think the very same clouds above are on their way to some distant place, to be viewed by eyes unknown to us, even if, in watching them long enough, they shape-shift, change color, grow or shrink in size before they’re out of sight. Whether stratus or cirrus, nimbus or cumulus, clouds are ephemeral. They change no matter how much we observe, pay attention, record. The exact shape a cloud, if only for a brief time, takes, cannot be predicted, and just as a fingerprint is unique, it can never again be the exact duplicate of any that preceded it.

Yet, sometimes, clouds do seem constant. Several years ago, I was lucky to visit the Serengeti Plains, to walk on that vast, immemorial place stretching in all directions as far as my eyes could see. There, among the solitary acacia trees and large pre-Cambrian kopjes, among a profusion of creatures indigenous to a primeval, seemingly unchanged landscape that in a staggering number of millennia predates me, it was easy to believe the wind raking the grasses and the towering clouds inevitably building each late afternoon were the very ones originating in the distant past.

Some things are certain. Black clouds portend. Blue skies can’t protect. Who can forget that on the September morning the Twin Towers buckled, the sky they’d stood against couldn’t have been a more vivid blue? And above the Bay the afternoon I received news of my brother’s sudden death in far-off Arizona, the sky couldn’t have been more cloudless, its flawless blue demanding praise.

And how cloudless, seemingly blank and unbenign was the sky when, in the following days, my sister and I attempted to walk the paths of Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Gardens, one of my brother’s favorite places. Researching memorial benches, we staggered in the relentless and blistery 115 degree heat, finding too few places to escape the sun beneath an unsympathetic blue. 

It was a different story, though, the next morning when we boarded a plane. Through its tiny windows, we could see that we were journeying back to landscapes more familiar to us. High overhead, we were being transported, comforted by the ever-changing ephemeral clouds. And whatever else up there dwells.