Flies Like Rain

A single desultory fly zooms to and fro within the confines of my lampshade, pattering and pinging against it without cease.  This is what you are doomed to do if your life span is three days long and all other forms of life regard you as a despicable annoyance.

Now the fly has escaped into the greater realm of the livingroom, and rain has started falling outside, hurtling downward from turbulent masses of warm and cold atmosphere somewhere high above while the fly hurtles itself in a zig-zag pattern, the very illustration of insanity.  

It seems the fly has brought the rain.  His random trajectories and self-destructive bashing against the lampshade earlier had the same pinging busyness as the rain does now on the hard surfaces of the house.  He flung himself toward my open window earlier, rushing headlong into the interior of my room, probably to his great surprise (having hit the pane a few hundred times before that), a weird little pratfall move that flies are prone to, I would think, erratic as all their flight is, without purpose and without aim.

And here I sit quietly, not randomly moving like fly nor pelting raindrops, but in juxtaposed stillness.  I wonder if flies come from another world where everything but they move wildly in all directions at once so that the fly feels like I do now, perfectly still.  In his mind, the fly could be holding still, while his senses tell him everything else really is moving all willy nilly.  This assumes flies have minds, albeit briefly lit ones, of course.  

One way or another, a moving fly is immediately aggravating, but the rain is not even though both make the exact same pattering sound as they hit things.  But since the sound is the same, they are alike, and who would make that comparison except a sitting-still human with sleep in her eyes on a Saturday night?

Storm's Afoot

There is a restless cold, an unruly power loose in the world outside.  Crashing hail descends from dark gangs of cumulus run through with lightning.  Galloping thunder barrels overhead like a herd of heavy beasts clattering through a narrow rocky canyon.  It is dripping and dark.

The heavy weather seems potent and unpredictable.  It warrants respect and preparation, glowering up there, wet and gloomy, laced with ice that rattles down on slicked gray city streets.

What are we to make of this?  It's day and night, both.  Darkness and light collide in a fury of pounding rain and cold.  Step aside and let the powers clash until they weary of it and leave us.  Patience is the only thing.  Wilderness is everywhere in storms like this, stretching its talons, flexing its claws.  Your beating heart is answered by the drumming rain, and it in turn is echoed in the rush of wind.

LIght On a Winter Morning

I wondered what to pay attention to this morning, going here and there, across town and home again.  People? The radio?  The weather?  Ideas?

No.  It was sunlight.

I noticed as I turned onto the main street traversing Monterey that the day's palette of colors was coolly silver with tones of blue and gray.  Everywhere.  Everything, even ugly things, were cast in a special light.  Not so bad to see a big ocean whose surface was riffled by an onshore breeze and the sky's reflection broken into infinite bits of varying blue.  Not so bad to see an ocean look like hammered silver and birds stitching it to the sky with crooked black wings in silhouette.  The rooftop of a grand but dark old building, overgrown with a winter bloom of gold moss and lichen, looked like it had come right up out of the very earth itself.  There were twin round towers of pale silver, tubes that if tall enough could transport hope straight up and joy straight down from angels, silver themselves, as you know.  A king must have passed through, littering the scene with casually flung coins; rain puddles and dew were as good as coin  or sequins tacked to cloaks and scabbards.  If you squinted your eyes just so, that is.  And I did.  Of course I did.

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.

Rain Coming

The shifting clouded sky looks haunted, distressed.  It's streaked with tattered shreds that look like dreams and nightmares, vaporized and drifting aimlessly.  Ominously fantastic clouds are stretched from one corner to the other of the heavens.

There is a heavy swell piling up on rocks and shoreline, overwhelming tidal pools and then draining out in gurgling rivulets.  Long heaving rushes of water, each one going further up the shore than the last, have interludes of silence between them, as if they are pausing to consider staying or returning once again.    

The air stinks of guano and rotting seaweed, nearly palpable in its density, at lower tidal zones, in areas shielded from currents and waves.  When the breeze blows, it's edge is cool and sobering.

An encounter between warm, heavily moist clouds from the south west and cold impatient currents from the northeast are meeting at the shore, high overhead.  Today the sky is haunted with sad memories, sagging with regret, weeping with remorse.  Teardrops of rain are flowing, running, trickling down the hillsides, eventually joining the salted depths of ocean waiting at the shore.  The swells gather them into their arms, forgiving, grateful.

Swimmin' in the Rain

I swam with friends today who told stories of hailstones on the ground the size of walnuts, of wind tearing branches off trees and the kinds of whoppers that bring dimension and thrill to the otherwise steady grind of getting along with the weather in the wintertime.

A friend has two dogs, both small, and one is young and silly, a puppy.  "She's only five pounds, a little Chihuahua mix, not a Husky. She's afraid to go outside, and I don't blame her. There were potted plants flying around the patio. Just think if she went out - she'd be flying around, too."  Except for certain damage to the dog, that idea has appeal to me.

It was in the mid 40s at swim time, no heater in the locker room and no one wanted to brave the dash from there to the pool much.  It's the only bad part about swimming on a day wrapped in cold wind, delivered with rain and overcast.  The strategy is to get your stuff ready, yell and complain about it with your friends, and then all of you burst out of the locker room at once, run for the pool and jump in, which is what we did. 

Our swim coach is a tough cookie:  "People always complain about having to swim in the rain.  What are they afraid of, getting wet?"  No.  That'd be a fear of lightning, I believe.  "I'll let you know if I see lightning.  If it looks like it's getting close, I'll make you get out."  I thought of all of us caught in the pool by a slamming jolt of lightning.  The only comfort -- and not one that I'd ever be able to relate to a friend later -- was that I would certainly die doing something I loved. 

We were in the middle of the workout, resting briefly at the wall when we heard a low rumble.  The Monterey Airport is nearby and a friend confidently stated the rumble was a jet taking off.  It's possible.  About a 50-50 chance of lightning vs jet, and the sound is easily confused.  I was thinking lightning, not jet, was making the sound, and I felt a bit uneasy, but not uneasy enough to stop and get out.   

Shortly after the rumble stopped, rain - big ice-cube-cold rain slanting down hard - was stabbing our arms and pinging off our swim caps.  We kept on and felt crazy, but swimmers pride themselves on things like that.  Most fringe-sport athletes do.  Rugby players, cross-country skiiers, that kind of athlete.  We are not a pampered and spoiled lot.  We do crazy things like swim in heavy downpours, hail, freezing cold.  Why just sit on the couch when the alternative was so strange and fun? 

Now the rain is coming straight down, stitching lines of water from the even, silver gray of heaven to the dark earth below.  Rivulets are flowing down the street and everywhere is gurgling, splatting, pattering rain.