High Pressure System

Somewhere on the drive between Stoneham and Meredith New Hampshire, the seasons changed. As I wrote last week, I’ve spent the last few months without once feeling cold outside. I brushed past my beloved bathrobe – my constant companion while at home – and wondered why I had such a useless thing the other day. As we laded the family vehicle of burden with the heavy gear of our adventuring (bikes dripping off the bag like wax from a candle) I felt the familiar prickle of sweat across the brow of my back.

But over the glow of the campfire, I felt compelled to add a flannel shirt. And then a hoodie sweater. And as we lay under the canopy of stars, seamed by the Milky Way, I remembered that I really should bring an additional blanket on this last camping trip of the year, and that I’d long contemplated upgrading our sleeping bags from “useless” to “slightly useful”. I shivered in the cold, and it was strange.

I’d thought that my family was working our usual camping-weather-magic. You know, the rain dance kind of magic. I sent a note out to my coworkers promising a cessation in the drought, based on past successes there. The prediction that Hermine would land just about the time we’d be wrapping up led to a conclusion that maybe we should wrap up ever so slightly earlier, so we wouldn’t have to put away a wet tent. But I felt good – nay, noble! – in bringing the rains to our parched land.

(Aside: I’m coming to see a drought drought as being very similar to a romantic drought. The more desperate you are, the less likely you are to get lucky. Apparently our ground is so dry it just tears apart rain storms for the water before they can even form.)

***Now, let us take a break to comfort a terrified child who hears horrors lurking in the wind. I laid myself next to him and turned on a Youtube video of sleep hypnosis. I think you should all be extremely impressed that I made it back to my keyboard to finish my blog post.***

But, the rains have not come. The high pressure which has lurked over the northlands these last few months is fending off a determined attack from the warm waters of the south. These storms birthed in the womb of the Sahara, nurtured over the Atlantic crossing, trained in the placid waters of the Caribbean have had their attack shunted aside by the shield of warm, dry air that hovers protectively above us. There was no rain last night. There are great gusty sighing winds tonight, with spatters of rain. But there are not the pelting sheets of water that wash away the slough of Summer and turn roads into temporary rivers.

Still, it feels good to feel the pressure drop. We humans are far less attuned than our animal brethren to such things, but I think we still know when storms are coming on a physical level. The drop in barometry has always felt uncanny to me. I (as you may have noticed) get poetical. (My terrified son just called my sensible. He meant it as a compliment. But I am not so sure that I am always sensible. I am not so sure I wish to be sensible.) The winds feel wild and my heart rides on their wings. The autumn is coming. I’ve always been able to feel closer to my truer self in the clearness of autumn. And I can reach past sensibility in an autumn storm.

Outside my window, something rubs. There is a creaking complaint against the wind. The “sensible” homeowner in me (who has a litany of complaints, at the moment) does not believe that the scraping is either part of my house or in a tree that has reach enough to touch my house. It is a dry and whiny sound, like the last remembrance of superstition. I won’t be surprised to find a branch down in the morning, and that complaining screed forever silenced.

We are not the same, after storms. Even after storms that deal us only glancing blows, turned aside by the armor of our pressure. For many, this is no metaphor but instead tragedy. For others, it is a chance for us to escape, however briefly, from the ridge of high pressure that locks us in the clear-skied and consistent heat to a wild moment of low pressure.