Big Black Wet

This morning glowered with heavy clouds that looked more beast than atmosphere.  It had rained all night, and I kept the window cracked to hear the dripping and pattering wet out there, a pretty sound that belied the rumbling, shifting masses overhead. Sometimes clouds like those seem to be more like movie set props that need to be shoved around and into position by harried stage hands than like they do actual clouds.  All that the whole sky needed was a director with a megaphone, "Let's pull that monster over Monterey and darken everything.  Heavy on the rain now.  Action!"  

In Pacific Grove, I was right underneath them and didn't really get the full measure of their heft until I drove north around the bay to its far eastern edge near Sand City.  Once I got out of the car and looked south, the dramatic layered aspect of the clouds arrayed all along the southern horizon was impossible to ignore.

The cumulus crowded around the hills and stood up on their hind legs pawing at the air, spoiling for a fight.  Some had white edges and a puffy quality for a few moments that was positively pretty.  Not for long though.  Constantly changing and tumbling, the cloud density increased and then lowered, impenetrably opaque, and soon rain was falling in the distance.

When clouds are heavy and stern, commanding attention from stage center as they were today, they act like an iron lid that has clanged down and darkened the water.  The color palette is a study in steel gray, silver, and iron black.  Rain hangs down like curtains, billowing and slanting across the hills and tree tops.

With that much dark water booming at the shore, it's simple to imagine a tsunami looming on the horizon and having to run for your life.  Or to imagine large sea monsters rising up and making awful noises while they lick their chops.  Winter cold and uncompromising forces of water and wind were taking no prisoners, from the look of it all.

There was no broad daylight as I looked around even then, at high noon.  Big surly rounds of churning moisture could have just sat down on the ground and squashed everything.

More rain to come in this sodden winter, and certainly a few days of storm surf and billowing clouds too beautiful to ignore.