Stay of Execution

Blizzard

It's 6:13 AM and perfectly silent, save for the occasional whoosh of the wind.  The streetlights on the snow make the outside world glow a strange pink, and in the cone of light cast by the lamppost you can see the air full of snowflakes.  The powerline that runs outside my window carries three inches of white on top of it.  My windowpane looks like it's been sprinkled with powdered sugar. 

The forecast on the web reads: Today....snow....ending late afternoon.  Very windy with considerable blowing and drifting snow.  Total snow accumulation 10 to 16 inches.  Highs around 12 degrees.  North winds 30 to 40 mph with gusts up to 55 mph.

Im going back to sleep.   There's nothing for this but hibernation. 

Whiteout

I turned back instead of driving all the way to my parents' place to have dinner.  It is snowing hard already and we're predicted to get 12 to 18 inches.  The roads have a swirling eddy of white snakes writhing on top of them.  It hasn't settled yet, at least not on the roads that have heavy traffic.  But the thick dancing snow that is kicked up by each passing car will soon be a white coat.  The visibility on the road is still reasonably good, but it promises to become more perilous as the wind starts to kick up. 

When I turned around I hadn't been going for long before I saw the shadow of a deer up ahead in the other lane.  It was a dark shadow, silhouetted in the very edge of an oncoming car's headlight range.  I slowed down, worried that the approaching car wouldn't see the deer until too late, would brake too fast and slide into my lane, or spin off and cause the car behind him to careen into my lane.  As I watched the deer stand motionless, I thought about the phrase "deer in the headlights."  Then the deer melted into the darkness, and the car passed the spot where the deer once was, and then passed me and the moment was over. 

On Wednesday night I drove home from dinner a few towns away in a smaller blizzard than this one is supposed to be.  It was the most dangerous conditions I've ever been in.  I inched along at thirty miles an hour and sometimes could not see the front of my car.  From time to time an overconfident nutjob would pass me and leave a trail of white that made me slow down perhaps to twenty.  I had no idea where I was on the highway, even when I got very close to home.  I passed a Subaru Forester off the road, tilted upward at a crazy angle, hazards blinking.  I was hardly past it when it was swallowed up by the white, as though it had never been there at all.

Black Birds

Driving into town this afternoon the sky was this inbetween lavender grey, lit by a strange light.  The clouds were low and full of the potential of snow but some high clear patches gave everything a strange glow.  And as I approached Munjoy Hill I saw that the air was full of birds.  Crows or ravens or something were approaching, singly or in twos and threes, from every direction.  There were some clustering in trees and some landing on the hill but mostly the sky was full of them.  Some birds fly in flocks that look like schools of fish but these birds were loners, straggling toward some kind of event like townspeople showing up for a city council meeting.  It felt like Halloween, seeing them in the diminishing late afternoon light, under a yellow three-quarter moon. 

Wintry Mix

It snowed most of the day yesterday, then sort of sleeted for a while, embedding nice little pellets of ice into the soft snow, then rained, saturating everything with water, and then froze solid over night.  So this morning everything's encased in a thick, heavy shell of ice-snow.  It's a mess. 

Chilly Morning

It's not light anymore when I get up. I guess it's not completely dark, but it's a low grey light, not a sunshiney morning. And it's chilly, and dewey, and I want to wear a sweatshirt over my tank top. When we got home from our walk this morning (an easy one, with my shins still complaining) I went around the house shutting windows.

My California-native Housemate and I were talking the other night about the extreme seasonality of Maine. How different fall feels from summer, and what a bittersweet relief it is to have night come on earlier. She asked, "Are summers always this...intense?" They are. A Maine summertime is a sprint of outdoor playtime, midweek adventures after work, laughter and cocktails on the porch, visiting houseguests, wedding festivities, boating and gardening and yard projects. The onset of fall, with the shortening of the days, the departure of transient guests from away, and the routine imposed on people who have academic schedules, is a dramatic change. Nights get dark and suddenly you want to gather in your kitchen again, with a couple of close friends and something bubbling on the stove, or curl up on the sofa reading under the warm light of a lamp. Friends who were scattered away, on their own summer sprints, start to reappear. The places you feel like going and the things you feel like doing change. It's like coming inside after recess.

It's still gorgeous out there -- more so than in any other month, I think, with the low yellow light and the reddening of the leaves here and there. But the tilt of the earth and the chilly clear dark nights begin to remind us of the pleasures of the indoors, too.

Humid

With the exception of Saturday, the past week or so has been rainy or grey and damp. Last night and today I noticed that the continued dampness has the whole house feeling clammy. It's like being on a sailboat for a week or so -- nothing quite dries out, and there's a vague sticky dampness to the air and all the towels.

I Forgot To Tell You

This morning we had a nice growly rumbly dark sky and suddenly it was all flashing thunder and big bangs and hard wet big-drop downpour. It reminded me of a thunderstorm that came through this weekend, on Sunday afternoon. We'd finished racing for the day and had rafted up the race committee boat in the Benjamin River (actually a cove, not much of a river) alongside one of the competitors. My dad and I were scoring the races, down below, but I could hear everyone remarking on the thunderstorm moving towards us. When I came up on deck and looked at it myself it was truly impressive. I've seen sudden storms before, but this was something new. The front was moving through and pushing clear blue sky out of its way. The sky just in front of the storm was bent sort of a pale yellowish blue, and the storm clouds themselves were amazing. It should have been the illustration in an atmospheric sciences book. The front was thick and black grey, with a remarkably sharp boundary, and the amazing thing about it was that, although most of the front was straight, there was a distinct part that curved, like a circle. Like someone was pushing a plate along through the sky. And the clouds that formed the curving front themselves were textured -- they were bent and contorted into the bend. You could see the rolling and the turmoil of the air. I've forgotten the little atmospheric science I ever learned but the sky has never looked to me more like an illustration of fluid dynamics, the mixing of air with different pressures and moisture contents. It was beautiful. And in the belly of the storm it was of course thick and grey with rain, with big flashing lightning and enormous drops hurtling down on us and turning the gravel roadbed into streams and sluices.

It might be my favorite rainstorm yet. My other favorite was in 1989, sailing in Newport, when a front came through that had an edge to the rain so dramatic that, from my place on the deck, I could count down the seconds until the rain would be at us just like counting down the seconds until a puff of wind would hit the boat. Usually, you know, you sort of gradually enter a raincloud, a few drops here and there, gradually thickening up as you move into its center. This wall of rain arrived with an edge as sharp as if it had been cut with a razor, so there was a moment or two when the port side of the boat was being showered with rain, while the starboard side was still dry. Sitting there on the dry side, listening to the dramatic rattling of the rain moving across the deck to me, knowing that in half a breath's time I would be drenched, was an unforgettable moment. I had never seen rain like that and loved the fact that the weather has so many forms.

I know it's dorky but I've decided to add a category to this blog for writing about the weather.

Electricity

Last night and this afternoon there have been these amazing powerful thunderstorms moving through town. My dog doesn't like it much to have the sky flashing and shaking, but I think it's pretty great. I never gave up the childhood habit of counting the seconds after a flash of lightning until the thunder crashes. Last night around midnight a dramatic storm moved closer and closer until the lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous and the rain sounded like hail against the windows and the dog paced nervously around the house. Then it moved off until soon I couldn't even see the flashes, just heard the low growling rumble of thunder in the distance.

Back when I ran a sailing program I used to have to figure out when a sultry day would turn into a sudden thunderstorm, so I could tell the instructors when to keep the kids off the water, or to bring them in if they were off sailing. There's a certain way the clouds thicken and rise, a heavy grey-pink thickness in the air, something I can't describe but came to recognize, an instinct. In Camden, where I taught sailing, the thunderstorms formed back off behind the church steeple, near a hill, and moved eastward to the harbor with a surprising suddenness. Around here I haven't studied them with quite the same interest, so I don't know where in the sky to watch them appear.