Notes from my Knapsack 8-20-20

Notes from my Knapsack 8-20-20

Jeff Gill

 

Summer clouds and heavenly powers

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August is a grand month for cumulonimbus formations in the west.

 

Sometimes, depending on where you live or spot you've found to sit, you get a good view as they pass in review to the north or south.

 

But to the west, on the horizon, as Elijah's servant tells him "a cloud the size of man's hand" first appears, so too can we see the first blossoming upwards of a storm cloud.

 

It might look like a cheery little cotton puff, or a happy cone of cotton candy, but there's a certain structure and development you learn to notice. If you have the right perch, and the time at hand, you can sit and gaze and soak in the scene, some thirty to sixty thousand feet above the ground, and forty or fifty miles or more away, a flat triangle bent along the long flat bottom by the curve of the earth.

 

If it's to your west, though, this time of year it is making good time towards you, maybe twenty or thirty miles an hour. And as it is spreading and growing this is where a good cumulonimbus can reward a meditative hour, or even just a precious ten minutes. When you can still yourself, and see clearly enough with your eyeballs, binoculars adding to the fun, but not necessary, so you can see the power and surge and uplift of those cloudy curves pushing out and up to where the energy behind it starts to make an impression on you, long before its winds ruffle your hair.

 

Under the right circumstances, but this time of year they're often there, you can watch the swirl and foamy geysering and outpouring upwards until they reach a natural, necessary ceiling. There's still sky overhead, but as if the cloud tops have hit a plaster overhead barrier, the cumulative upwards energy of the cloud starts to spread out, from side to side, flattening across an invisible layer of overhead air, necessarily cooler, absolutely blocking and even driving back down some of that heat energy boiling up.

 

Now it gets interesting. Under the classic anvil head of a cumulonimbus you can have air movement up and down, or under pressure closer to the ground it can end up going around and around. When rising warm air precipitates out moisture in the cooling updraft, the falling raindrop can get caught in ever more agitated currents swirling vertically, flung back up to where it chills and ices into a pellet, and with enough energy in the return gusts upwards after the pellet falls, it can pick up another layer of moisture, freezing on the upswing and down again – the growing hailstone only as big as the number of trips on the meteorological elevator it can take before falling to earth.

 

The spatter of hail finally making it to earth can herald a suicide squeeze of descending air that, compressed between the ground and weight of air above, squirts sideways into a spiral that can surge right into a funnel and then a tornado, spinning that energy down and around out of the immense forces weighing down from above.

 

By that time, of course, you've gone inside, the sky clouds over, and it's not as interesting to watch. Like many great dramas, a summer thunderstorm is best appreciated from a safe distance, preferably to one side.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been known to chase a storm or two, if safely from behind. Tell him how you enjoy summer skies at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.