Messages from Above

Imagine a world without clouds.

Picture a place where the sky presents an empty expanse of blue, day after day. Such a world would be dead. A planet without precipitation could not sustain life.

Why do I even wonder about such things? It's because I've been living in cloud gazers' heaven, the Flathead Valley in northwestern Montana. Here in this place that lives up to the state's 'Big Sky' motto, I watch the clouds each day in all their panoply.

Some mornings, bands of fog float halfway up the foothills of the surrounding Salish Mountains, arriving not on little cat feet, as Carl Sandburg wrote, but on silent hooves of deer. Flotillas of cumulus hurry above as if the sky were a busy bay. Bruised ranges of stratocumulus crowd and darken the day, and an anvil cloud rains on a distant ridge. Not the least: A vibrant light show plays each day at dusk, startling me anew every time I see it.

Last evening a mass of clouds came from the north like pink smoke from the window of a burning house. While I watched, the mass brightened, as if someone was turning up a dimmer switch, and in the course of a few heartbeats evolved into salmon and orange, and then into plum. I watched violet clouds turn to slate, their shapes shifting, and then witnessed a line of Canada geese fly straight through the new moon. My mind was empty and my heart full.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that for many years he was 'self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms.' Since moving to Montana, I've become a serious cloud watcher and thinker-about-clouds. Besides offering beauty, diversity, and volatility, clouds have much to tell those who pay attention to them. Ask any farmer, shepherd, aviator, or sailor.

'Clouds always tell a true story,' asserted 19th-century English meteorologist Ralph Abercromby. In order to see if cloud forms were the same around the world, Abercromby circled the globe twice in the late 1880s, then wrote about his experiences in Seas and Skies in Many Latitudes, or Wanderings in Search of Weather. Abercromby was so smitten by clouds that he and Swedish colleague H. Hildebrand Hildebrandsson proclaimed 1896 the International Year of Clouds and published the first International Cloud Atlas that year. The atlas, based largely on the work of English meteorologist Luke Howard, listed ten cloud types. 'Number nine in the list was cumulonimbus, the tallest of all the types,' writes Gavin Pretor-Pinney in The Cloudspotter's Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds (Perigee, 2006). 'To be on cloud nine is therefore to be on the highest one.'

An amateur's handbook presenting characteristics of different kinds of clouds-and 'official publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society' -The Cloudspotter's Guide incorporates information about the history of meteorology along with treatment of clouds in art and literature. Pretor-Pinney notes, for example, Shakespeare's dialogue between Hamlet and the obsequious Polonius, who agrees with Hamlet that a particular cloud is shaped like a camel, a weasel, a whale.