The nebulous plain

Sept. 29, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

The clouds in Amarillo do really strange things. Here's what they do:

Sometimes the sky will be peppered with your Average Cumulus Cloud. But due to some kind of high-altitude prevailing wind, they'll all be uniformly skewed in one direction, like Hershey's Kisses that have melted slightly. They unfailingly point away, in every direction but here.

Sometimes they're layered, and the late afternoon sun will brightly illuminate the lower layer, casting a shadow on the upper so that there appears to be a storm brewing high above while we're sheltered in a buffer of fair weather at the surface. And on some days, columned palisades rise in vapor overhead, as they do in rock from the canyon floor.

Thunderstorms can be seen for miles across the high plains, and in an otherwise clear evening sky there will be a brooding patch of rust lofting ominously into the telltale anvil-top of a thunderhead. After nightfall, the unbroken horizon shows lightning supporting the very sky on crooked stilts.

Once it was overcast, and below the shroud of nimbostratus the setting sun hazed through a yellowed curtain of distant rain that immured the entire plain. Yet only a few degrees above the margin of clouds, a window of pure crystal blue opened, through which one might imagine launching oneself in flight along the one certain path toward freedom.

A fair sky promises calm, but without a cloud it gives no direction.