Clouds that go . . . .

In my youth, we used to spend countless summer days lying on the cool, green grass and looking heaven-bound into the vastness of the mysterious sky. The infinite structure of what was far beyond the visible eye was pondered and placed aside in their young imaginations and immediately replaced by what the visible eye could see: Clouds. It was there that we could comprehend some of the mysterious forces of earth and sky and their natural compatibility.

There are landscapes other than the one we have at our feet. The celestial landscape we have spread out before us – the one we raise our heads in reverence to view – is a vast and majestic place that takes our imagination to limits far-exceeding what lies before us at eye level. Far off and beyond the distant woods, the sky touches and stretches out silently and infinitely, and the dreamy gorgeousness of what we see and, especially, of what we imagine out there in the l00 million square miles, staggers human thought.

Clouds start, just as great opera singers do, when a volume of rising air cools down, then they top out when that air hits a layer that is either warmer than or as warm as itself. Then the great show bubbles, like great droplets of music hitting against the theatre’s ceiling, then it floats, and puffs, like something within it is blowing up.
If we can use clouds as a metaphor for the exciting aspects of modern meteorology, atmospheric physics, and physics alone, we can well imagine that what is happening directly above our heads is, indeed, a choir that is both invisible and as verbose and musical as all the great opera singers in history joining together to out sing the magnificent Morman Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of works by Sibelius or Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus from “Messiah.

If these cycles can be likened to a show that has no ending in the great theatre that has sets decked out in gauzy puffs, straight and curly, and even silky wisps that float across the sky, and then take on the names of Cirrus, Cumulonimbus, Altostratus, Cumuli, and even Mammatus (because they resemble a cow’s udder), then that free show above our mortal heads is one to behold with wonder for its inspiration and great beauty.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, a London pharmacist named Luke Howard devised a simple scientific and mental way to better understand and remember the various cloud formations. For instance, precipitating clouds (nimbus); curled or wispy clouds (cirrus); layered clouds (stratus), and heaping puffed clouds (cumulus). More complex identifications go something like this: a wispy and veiled sky covering (cirrostratus); rolled masses of clouds, or rounded layers (stratocumulus); puffy precipitating clouds (cumulonimbus). Howard believed clouds have physical contexts and histories that can be traced, better understood, discovered, and analyzed.

I have a memory of an autumn day of another year, not so long ago.
In the eastern sky, the mid-morning sun penetrated a hazy blue color that grew into a soft azure as the sky drifted off to the western horizon. Far off in the distance, a lone, gigantic, gauzy puff of cloud appeared in the southern kingdom of the sky. Quietly and slowly, the cloud drifted lethargically over the hill, almost in slow motion. Then it pushed forward, unrolled, stretched, and scattered its edges; and, finally, it curled suddenly and moved over the low hillside and into full view.

Writer Fred Hapgood wrote in an April l944 edition of Smithsonian Magazine: “Watching a cloud is like watching an animal in an invisible habitat. We see the creature appear, advance, pause, twist and whirl, but we never see why.”
The landscape of the sky offers one of the best educational and entertaining shows we earthlings can view, and there is no price of admission.
One of my favorite poems is one by Edward Rowland Sills in which he speaks of clouds and their reference to daily living.

“Today, I thought, I will not plan nor strive;
Idle as yon blue sky, or Clouds that go
Like loitering ships, with sails as white as snow,
I simply will be glad to be alive.”

(Research credits go to Fred Hapgood, Luke Howard, and Edward Rowland Sill.)