Dragons Above and Other Wonders

There are certain things in life that really can’t be explained. I’m sure you could give a few examples of your own, but here’s one of mine—and I admit that I was reticent, actually reticent, about posting this when it happened because it seemed too fantastic to be believed, and I thought people might think I was making it up. I didn’t get a photo, you see, and thought I might be accused of exaggerating. I was having trouble believing it, and I was there.

However, as you know, Wordplay strives ever to tell the truth, and if we left this out, it would be a dereliction of duty, I think. What happened was this: I’d spent some time one afternoon putting together a photo essay about dragons trending in the culture. As I recall, it was right after that, as I was leaving the coffeehouse, that I walked out into a brewing storm. I drove over to the grocery store, marveling at the big mess of clouds swirling overhead.

While I was on the way over there, I started to notice that one cloud in particular had a shape to it. It was a long, black coil, like a snake, or, actually, a dragon, with a dragon head, a long, long body stretching and twisting across half the sky, and a mouth open as if ready to spew fire. I have never seen a cloud shaped like that and am sure it has something to do with one big air mass meeting another along a fairly uniform line. I know there had to be a scientific reason for that gigantic, rolled-up carpet shape, but it was still jaw-dropping, like other sights in nature you come across once in a great while. I wish I had taken a photograph, but lightning was striking in both the far and middle distance, and for safety’s sake, I stayed in the car until it all passed.

Besides thinking people wouldn’t believe me, I admit that I was so amazed by the appearance and timing of this cloud dragon that I started to wonder if it was some kind of a trick. Now, I know I once posted a blog about wild weather events I’d been caught up in and my speculations about whether someone (AKA the government) might be experimenting with cloud-seeding, etc. Even if someone is working on that, in some obscure bureau or other, I can’t imagine that anyone’s weather experiments have advanced to the level of cloud-sculpting on that scale, even if they know how to make precipitation fall.

I suppose I was trying to put the whole thing out of my mind, but I saw a program on The Weather Channel about “The World’s Wildest Weather Events” in which various phenomena like this were documented and discussed. One of the meteorologists was discussing the very rare phenomenon of straight-edge clouds, something she herself had witnessed, and she said that she had a difficult time believing the evidence of her own eyes even though she could explain the science behind it. It was, truly, an incredible sight, but no more so than what I had seen. I have to thank the meteorologist for sharing her story, which gave me the impetus to think over what I had seen and decide that, no matter how fantastic the event, not sharing it because it seemed unbelievable was precisely the wrong tack. After all, this blog exists as a forum for exploring the presence of mythology in everyday life, and if a cloud dragon appearing over your head is not an irruption of mythology into everyday life, I don’t know what would be.

When something like this happens, I’m tempted, as possibly you are, to try to come up with an explanation. I’m not sure there is one. Of course, Jung called this type of thing synchronicity and believed that it was evidence of a sort of dialogue between the human psyche and nature. Even if this is true, how it all works is still a mystery. I consider myself a capable writer, but I’m not at the level of conjuring up castles and dragons in the air, no matter how in tune my brain waves may be with the atmospheric vibe on a given day. Maybe it’s just a matter of having your eyes open and noticing things. The more active your imagination is, the more there is to see. And then, of course, you have to remember to look up.

Thoroughly Modern Thor

Well, another day, another non-dollar here at Wordplay, but it's Christmas, and we don't have a tree or presents, but we have been watching holiday movies and getting a kick out of that. Most of them I have seen before, and some grow brighter with time, and some fade a little, but then, I've written many times about the phenomenon of changing perspective, and you probably don't want to hear about that again.

"Why don't you tell us something we don't know?" I can hear somebody saying. Funny, but I was about to say the same thing to you. Why don't you tell me something I don't know? I guess now we're at an impasse and will have to resort to talking about the weather in lieu of anything else. Come to think of it, they do seem awfully excited about catastrophic events over at The Weather Channel these days, so maybe they are on to something. And here was me thinking the lot of them had just fallen into the holiday punchbowl.

There was a scene in a holiday movie the other night in which two people got into a sled, and right on cue, snow began to fall on them, and them alone. It was a column of snow that moved with them, their own personal weather system. I sort of know how they feel. There have been a few times this year when I felt like there was a cloud following me around, though none of it was anything unexpected or out of the way for the time of year and the location, not like the recent freak snowstorm in the southern U.S. (which didn't reach us here).

I certainly had my share of storms, though, from the Big Wind that walloped Oklahoma when I was driving to California in June, to the Big Black Wall of rain that soaked me in Texas as I was driving to a friend's house (looking, I swear, like something out of The Day After Tomorrow--never have I seen a cloud like that outside of a special effects movie), to the big bolt of lightning that struck close by just as I stepped outside after returning to Lexington in September. Then there was the downpour that started in the early morning just as I was going out to my car recently to leave for the airport, a trip that began with pouring rain and ended in fire in California. That was a bit uncanny for a single trip.

Now, of course, I suffered no physical effects from any of these events, though I could have. It wasn't like I suffered through the hurricanes in the Caribbean or lost a home to fire like many others have--but I definitely feel I've had my share of near misses with weather. I was reading an article recently about an organization sponsored by our government that has been studying UFOs--which some officials, including former senator Harry Reid, who championed this group--apparently take very seriously. The thought crossed my mind, based on my own rash of experiences with extreme weather, that some of these unidentified objects might be aircraft carrying out some kind of high-altitude weather experiments. Of course, I'm merely being fanciful here--if someone had that type of technology, they would be using it to make rain over Southern California, not dropping thunderbolts on random citizens.

And if the U.S. government doesn't know anything about such a project, I'm sure I don't. Of course, the government is kind of a compartmentalized place, and one hand doesn't always know what the other is doing, by all accounts. Just because Harry Reid didn't know anything about making rain doesn't mean somebody else doesn't.

This seems to me the makings of a plot for a science fiction movie. Just imagine it, a world in which someone controls weather and other natural phenomena for purposes of war, lightning bolts instead of bullets, earthquakes instead of tanks, as if the old gods, Thor and Poseidon, were astride Olympus once more. And even worse than that, think of the possibility of holding a place siege by keeping the rains away, letting homesteads burn and crops wither, attempting to beat your enemies into submission by means of a merciless sky. Though I admit I have trouble thinking of that as warfare--it seems more like a criminal act. Of course, if you had the means to do things like that, it might not be something you'd want to admit. You could do a lot of sneaky mischief and no one would be the wiser.

The old science fiction movies in which the threats to civilization come from the outside represent a different paradigm than this one. Even the movies in which science unleashes unintended consequences, giant insects resulting from radiation mutations and so on, are in a different category, because what I'm envisioning is a world in which the consequences are not unintended but purposeful. This would be a Matrix-like existence indeed, one in which one is never sure of the extent to which a natural event is "natural" or manipulated--how could you tell the difference? In the old dispensation, people were generally remorseful about the havoc they unleashed (except for the guy that thinks the way to solve the problem is by using even more technology, and there's always one of those). In the new dispensation, the technology is the calculated means to an end.

I guess I'm old-fashioned, but I find all of this too scary to contemplate, even if it is just a movie I'm writing in my head. Though one can think of good uses to which weather control might be put, the bad uses are pretty alarming. So where does that leave us? Why, in a brave new world, where else?

I guess you can see why I'd rather be watching Christmas movies, and I'm sure you would be, too. It's not really the season for these apocalyptic imaginings, so I'm just going to blame it on The Weather Channel for all the shouting they're doing over there. That and the thunderbolt that almost got me.

Natural Phenomenon

I have a memory of sitting in a car with my brother in downtown Fort Myers, Florida, when I was about seven or eight, and he was nine or ten. If I remember right, our Dad had gone into the insurance company to pay a premium or take care of some other business. I'm not sure why I recall that, but I do. Anyway, it was a mostly cloudy day, late in the afternoon, and while we were sitting there, looking toward the roofs at the other end of the street, an unusual cloud formation filled the spaces between buildings to create a shape that looked, for a brief time, uncannily like the state of Florida. To my eyes, it was quite incredible.

It was my brother who pointed it out to me, and I can still remember him saying, in an authoritative, scientific sort of way, "That's what you call a natural phenomenon."

I'm bringing this up because of what happened when I was out walking Friday afternoon. It was five o'clock, probably pretty close to the same time of day as that long-ago wonder. It's also a bit of a coincidence because I wrote another post about something that happened at five o'clock a while back; if there's a quota on five o'clock phenomena, I seem to be running through it rapidly.

I had put my sunglasses on when I left home, appreciating the blue sky and bright afternoon but doubting whether I really needed them; it was partly cloudy, and, anyway, the sun was rather low in the sky. It kept peeking in and out of the clouds, but by the time I'd gone nearly all the way around the Arboretum, it was shining directly in front of me.

That's when it happened. Due no doubt to moisture in the air and the layers of clouds above and below, the sunlight shaped itself, briefly, into a column of fire, dead center in the sky. It was so remarkable that the first thing I wondered was if anybody in rush hour traffic was seeing it, too. It looked like something that, in ancient times, would have been taken by astrologers or prophets as a "sign," as in, "Yo, a plague of locusts is at hand," or at least, "It's time to harvest the persimmons."

I'm cynical about "signs," which seem to me to be overdone these days, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," but the event was beautiful and striking and certainly fit into my brother's category of natural phenomena--so I have another to add to the list of the many I've seen. I know there are names for almost any atmospheric occurrence you can think of, but I don't know what the name for a column of light is. I was mainly just happy that I had my sunglasses on so I didn't have to squint at it and also that it happened when I was facing in the right direction. It did occur to me that there's no telling how many wondrous and amazing things happen around us all the time when we happen to be looking the other way.