Summer is a time to sit in your yard or beside a trickling stream, and watch … drifting clouds. In our money-obsessed culture, cloud-watching is ridiculed. In school we learn about the earth, not the sky. Maybe one day in twelve years is devoted to a description of clouds, and even that’s not very useful. Terms like “stratocumulus” and “cirrostratus” don’t capture the romance of floating islands in the sky.
That’s why you need this handy guide to cloud-appreciation.
The easiest way to describe a cloud is by analogy. One cloudlet looks like a shopping cart, another like the head of a rhinoceros. Some clouds clearly have faces, and it’s obvious if they’re frowning or smiling – or staring blankly. The items in our daily lives that clouds resemble are:pillows, mattresses, balled-up tissues, napkins, towels. One might speak of a particular cloud as a “squashed pillow” or a “half-soiled towel.”
Foods that clouds resemble are whipped cream, pancakes, mashed potatoes. Occasionally one sees the image of a hamburger in the sky. Or a row of waffles.
Some clouds look like UFOs – and others might actually be UFOs, disguised by brilliant scientists from the planet Amphrygelon.
Clouds also mimic the elaborate ruffled clothing aristocrats wore in the eighteemth century: petticoats, hoop skirts, fans, and especially the powdered wigs sitting on their heads. (Mme. Bergeret may be the best example of such a cloud-person.) Nowadays such fashion statements are only made by drag queens – because every wig is an artificial cloud.
In the biblical Book of Exodus, the Israelites followed God for 40 years in the desert – God cloaked in a cloud. In today’s secular world, we refer to “The Cloud” as the ultimate repository of all computer-based wisdom.
Clouds are musical. They are what music would look like if it were visible. One might speak of a cloud as a sonata or an aria, or a Romanian folk song.
Certain cloud formations clearly seem to be pointing up, while others point down – but that’s only because we read English from left to right. A cloud that’s extending from the lower left to the upper right of a section of sky looks like it’s heading upwards to us, but to a Hebrew or Arab speaker, it would be facing downwards.
Sometimes, even in the summer, the sky is all cloud, with darker clouds in front of the background cloud, like notes pinned to a bulletin board. And you can see the distance between the “note” and the “board”: fifty feet, or seventy-two.
In the modern world we can actually fly up into the clouds, almost become a cloud, but flying is more of a winter pastime. In the summer, here in the Hudson Valley, we stay where we are, and others come to us. They arrive, in part, to see our clouds.
“Come outside, look at this cloud!” you shout to your houseguests – so they obediently rush out of the house. And they are usually disappointed. Because by then the cloud has changed, always for the worse. Clouds mutate quickly, once you point to them.
A baseball stadium is an excellent venue for cloud study. Probably the best stadium in the Hudson Valley is Heritage Financial Park in Wappingers Falls, home of the Hudson Renegades. Whether you love or hate baseball, you’ll have lots of time sitting in the stands to gaze skyward. There are whole innings where the cloud-show is more entertaining than the game.
Cloud-observation also is pragmatic. My friend Dada Daneshanand lives in rural Nigeria. He told me on his last visit to New York, “I’m surprised that everyone here relies on weather forecasts. In Africa, we just look at the sky.” In other words, they “read” the clouds.
Should you put your wet towels on the clothesline now, or wait six hours? The clouds will inform you.
As I write this, I’m in Berlin on vacation, doing a little cloud research so I can deduct this trip from my taxes. Near the horizon I see a formation shaped like a poorly-rolled joint, next to a caricature of Richard Nixon in profile.
Yes, Nixon has followed me 3911 miles, 31 years after his death. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, one can quickly learn the distance from Phoenicia to Berlin.)
A lot of clouds look like distorted letters of the alphabet. Today I saw an E missing one leg, and a bedraggled Y lying on its side. In the course of three days, a good summer sky can produce the entire alphabet.
Here’s a good July game: blindfold someone and describe a cloud to them. Quickly pull off the blindfold, and see whether they can locate that cloud.
When comic books were invented, some genius had the idea to put cloudlike shapes over people’s heads, filled with human speech. We call these shapes “word balloons.” The more a comic character speaks, the larger the balloons grow. One can see a sky full of clouds as a series of word balloons, waiting for a letterer to fill them in.
Incidentally, if you’re too poor – or too lazy – to travel, you can view the skies of the world by typing in “clouds of Cameroon,” for example, and pressing “images” on Google. In fact, I just saw a white leaping dolphin – sculpted in water vapor – over Mount Cameroon.
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