It rained last night after all.
Well, “rained” might be a bit of an exaggeration; it was a shower, not much more, a few sprinkles driven hard and spun out on hurricane-force winds at alpine-desert elevations. The gale tore through here with plenty of force, causing several brownouts before the inevitable full loss of power that lasted for several hours. In the meantime, we could hear the winds clearing their own twisted path, hurling objects of every size and shape across the land.
One their fury was spent for the moment, an eerie calm descended: perfectly still, and just as perfectly dark, not a breath of movement anywhere in the oppressive post-midnight heat. Not a glimmer of light, either; the power would not return, despite several fitful attempts, for some hours yet.
None of this, you understand, was forecast. Yesterday was supposed to have a near-zero chance of any kind of precipitation whatsoever. But the weather is more powerful than those who pretend to read its ways, and it comes and goes as it will. It’s been affected, altered, by human misconduct, true, but anyone who thinks that they can control this kind of power is on a fool’s errand, to understate the case significantly.
It doesn’t stop folks from thinking otherwise, of course. After temporarily getting a halt called to an unspeakably foolish “cloud-seeding” plan that would have contaminated Indigenous lands and waters, the state has gone ahead and approved it anyway, “because of the drought.” In point of fact, it means “because of tourism,” since the colonial authorities have banked the whole of their control on the monies that colonial tourism delivers, and without water, no one will want to visit. There are the colonial ranchers, too, of course, not an insignificant lobby in a state where they have been trying to wrest first rights from the Indigenous populations who possess them for centuries now.
But as this summer has already shown, it’s all backfiring spectacularly. It would almost be funny if it weren’t so deadly.
An eternal irritant is the constant public panics by people who are unlikely ever to be threatened in any real way, and their corollary, the people who have absolutely no idea what’s going on around them and after all this time, continue to wonder where the smoke is coming from. The megafire has only been burning for two and a half months now, after all. The smaller fire to the west of us seems to be being better confined already, but the giant to the southeast has been reigniting repeatedly this week, racing out of control across yet another ridgeline yesterday and creating pyrocumulus clouds in excess of forty thousand feet high, thereby creating their own weather systems inside the plume itself. And as the day wore on, the weather systems developed into something more: a wall of slate blue thunderheads heavy with rain, enough to spark a lengthy flash-flood warning for two counties in the burned areas.
Here, summer storms are nothing to take lightly: This is traditionally our rainy season, or, as the meteorologists like to call it, the monsoon season. It refers to the weather patterns and track, as well as the nature of the rains themselves, all of which are very different from, say, the monsoons that occur in India (or at least they used to be; with the current climate catastrophe dogging the planet, perhaps theirs have changed in ways similar to our own by now). Here, the summer rainy season can take a day from a hundred and five degrees to seventy (and back again) in a matter of minutes, as the high icy towers collide with the hot air settled over the land during the morning hours. The winds whirl and spin, creating their own vortices as they crash up against the mountain slopes, then turn and race back for another run. Very often, a dozen or two drops are all the warning we get before the heavens open up, unleashing torrents of flooding rains; when you read about it coming down in sheets, this is what they mean.
And then there is the ice.
I mentioned the temperature differential above. These clouds climb impossibly high, and they become just as impossibly cold — so cold, in fact, that what they drop is no longer in liquid form, but frozen solid into chunks of ice: Hail in summer. It’s a hard medicine, and sometimes, it accumulates so rapidly and so heavily that it looks like snow:
See the white patches in the foreground and o the grass in the middle left? That’s collected hail, and Wings shot the image from the doorway of his studio as it was still falling. All that swirling ice-water mix in the foreground? Fell in the space of a minute or two, no more. Somewhere I have some shots of a different storm where the hail so thoroughly rimed every surface that it did indeed look like snow.
It’s the phenomenon for which today’s featured work is named, a cuff adorned in the glorious greens of summer and the cooling effects of ice upon rich earth. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Hail In Summer Cuff Bracelet
One of the gifts of the rainy season is hail in summer, a bit of snowy white to grace the green of a heated earth. Wings brings together the green and the white and heat, too, with this slender cuff bracelet studded with gems of summer and winter. The slender band is stamped free-hand in a repeating pattern of directional symbols down the very center, spokes pointing to all of the Sacred Directions like a radiant star, or the crystalline structure of a snowflake. Each side of the band is edged in a separate repeating pattern of triangular motifs, a symbol used at once to represent the mountains and the shelter of the traditional lodge, radiant with light at the base. The ends of the band are rounded by hand and filed smooth, each stamped in a single radiant sunrise image. Along the center, five gems are set into scalloped bezels and backed with sterling silver, the layer then overlaid across the band itself — a cascade of three round cabochons of grass-green jade alternating with a pair of domed oval cabochons of snowflake obsidian, icy white patches adorning the glassy black molten material. The band measures 6″ in length by 1/4″ across; jade cabochons are 3/8″ across; snowflake obsidian cabochons are 1/2″ long by 3/16″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; jade; snowflake obsidian
$1,150 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a beautiful contrast, the glowing green of the jade with the cooler translucence of the obsidian. And it’s a reminder of what remains when the storm has passed and the hail has begun to melt:
That, of course, was a shot taken about seven years ago. We don’t often get rains like that now, and we certainly have not had such lush corn growing so tall and healthy.
It’s been one of the greatest griefs of these changes, the inability to plan, to plant, to cultivate and grow, to pull our own food from the earth and our own medicine, too.
Medicine, like the geometric structure of the snowflake, of the ice crystal, opening like a flower to all directions, as though to seek the light.
Today is a mix of smoke haze and accumulating thunderheads. Supposedly there is rain in the forecast; if we get anything at all, it’s likely to be more of the same, a brief shower or two accompanied by plenty of wind but precious little water in any form.
Still, the towers are building themselves across the sky. It’s a little early at this hour of the morning, but perhaps that’s a sign for hope.
For now, we are living through days of a hard medicine of a different sort, one that generally falls under the label marked “consequences.” It doesn’t matter that we are not the ones who brought our world to this pass; the results affect us all, and typically affect our peoples first and worst. It’s true of so much right now, and yet we have no choice but to fight.
We have a world to leave to our children, and it must be a better one than this.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
