When I was a kid, my dad would try to explain wind to me and the movement patterns of clouds. He would say that when a storm was approaching our valley, the wind would usually come out of the south. We would stand in the yard for a minute or two and try to feel the upcoming storm, read the southwind's conch whisper – smell it, taste it. Our family loved storms. I loved storms because they were transitions, the same way I loved autumn and spring, dusk and dawn. Between-states, neither solid nor gas.
And summer storms especially.
The air snug, the clouds dark and kept as church secrets, little preambles of thunder, the hills yellow and orange and indian and everything crackling, seizing with static electricity, and we would worry about things like metal, and the big dying tree outside our house which might finally be stricken by lightning and topple to crush our living room. Dad would worry about forest fires. Until the rain came, anyway. The fat, cold tadpole droplets, in obedience to the law of falling bodies. These best-tasting and rare summer rains that we would watch from the porch, listening to bends of thunder. All feeling that maybe god wasn't so far away after all.
Dad, amateur weather enthusiast, would always be setting up rain gauges, thermometers, watching the weather on TV. He told me that his own father had wanted him to be a meteorologist at one point. I thought of meteorologists as strange and druidical beings. Watching storms unspun like silkworms for silk. Divining temperatures, droughts.
Maybe a little gourd-shaking and throat singing thrown in with the dances and polytheistic chants.
Weather was so much voodoo anyway. It seemed the only thing that the weatherman on TV could get right was the weekly temperatures. Dad and I would watch the weekly temperatures as if they were lotto numbers. For a roulette of cooling trends in the summer, a powerball of anything over freezing during the winter.
He owned a small weather radio, too, which fascinated me, and which he would listen to as he shaved or took showers. It was a small square box with a disproportionately large antenna that would extend probably two feet. Perhaps my first fascination with the weather radio was the antenna. I think I've always had a thing for antennas. Segmented like bamboo. Perhaps small, electronic attempts at Babel – the further extended, the more truthful the transmissions; like Adam's sistine finger desperately reaching, probing into paint. I also liked the on/off button. It was large, and the only button on the radio. It clicked into place satisfyingly.
The voice that came out with its meteorological statements when the button was pushed was always a mystery. Its words robotic, clipped, said in the same monotony as a summer heatwave. I wondered how anyone could speak that way. And for so long. The weather report would continue as long as the radio was on, unceasing. Giving reports of weather for locations all over the county. I wondered if he ever got tired, the man with the voice. He sounded bored. Bored with his gift of prophesy. On the floor of the bathroom I would listen to this small box droning like an apiary, with little bees of degrees and dew points buzzing inside. I listened to it for as long as I could. Seeing if the radio would ever go silent. If the man would ever stop talking.
He didn't.
I wondered who he was. If he had kids. What he wore. He sounded old, middle-aged. He sounded like he wore a cardigan with finger-worn buttons, and had patchy bags under his eyes. I would listen to his voice when no one was home, and his voice would fill the house. It would be like listening to my grandpa, who, coincidentally, lived in California, which was south, where the storms came from. I thought that maybe I knew this man.
My dad later told me that it was a computer simulating the voice.
I thought that my idea of this modern-day Prometheus chained to his rock of meteorology and radio was more exciting.
But it wasn't this man in the box who was the authority on weather. For me, it was my dad who knew more in the end. I wondered quite a bit why my dad wasn't the one on the television, standing in front of a map of the west coast, pushing winds and storm fronts as easily as military commanders pushing little troop pieces across maps, and theorizing war. My dad told me that clouds moved in concentric patterns, because that was how the wind blew. He told me how lightning formed, why it rained. Despite however much he knew, it seemed to me that besides space and the depths of the ocean, our own skies were the least known. The weather was one of the few things left that man couldn't control, much less predict.
I learned from My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison that the weather was something that you talked about in polite company. The weather, which was something we all experienced, but knew very little about, like light or God. Perhaps we talk about it to make it seem less strange, to assure ourselves that at least one thing is constant, that we are still affected and driven by unknowable forces, which is a comfort. Weather, reminding us of our impermanence, by wearing down rocks, mountains, swelling rivers, creating glaciers that shape the land like potters' hands. The weather, recycled. Reminding us that we have not come so far really. That ancestors also felt this summer rain the same way we did. And looked up. And closed their eyes. And were in awe and worry at the great skirt-slits of lightning, the pipe-cries of thunder.
Still, I'll listen to the same small weather radio.
The man with the cardigan will list tonelessly the humidity level for Jackson and Josephine county.
I will be comforted, knowing that someone out there is bored with what they cannot reckon, what they cannot doubtlessly divine.
But more than that, I will be comforted that someone out there knows more.
