The Waters of March

Here, on the last day of winter, are the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, "The Waters of March" by Antonio Carlos Jobim. If you know the song, you'll find yourself bopping along to these words. If you aren't familiar with this Brazilian classic, I've provided three links at the bottom of the page for your listening pleasure.

A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road

It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone 

It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun 

It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun 

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush 

A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush 

The wood of the wind, a cliff, a fall 

A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all 

It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope 

It's a beam it's a void, it's a hunch, it's a hope 

And the river bank talks of the waters of March 

It's the end of the strain 

The joy in your heart 

The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone 

The beat of the road, a slingshot's stone 

A fish, a flash, a silvery glow 

A fight, a bet the fange of a bow 

The bed of the well, the end of the line 

The dismay in the face, it's a loss, it's a find 

A spear, a spike, a point, a nail 

A drip, a drop, the end of the tale 

A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light 

The sound of a shot in the dead of the night 

A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump, 

It's a girl, it's a rhyme, it's a cold, it's the mumps 

The plan of the house, the body in bed 

And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud 

A float, a drift, a flight, a wing 

A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring 

And the river bank talks of the waters of March 

It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart 

A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road 

It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone 

A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe 

It's a thorn in your hand and a cut in your toe 

A point, a grain, a bee, a bite 

A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night 

A pin, a needle, a sting a pain 

A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain 

A pass in the mountains, a horse and a mule 

In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue 

And the river talks of the waters of March 

It's the promise of life in your heart 

A stick, a stone, the end of the road 

The rest of a stump, a lonesome road 

A sliver of glass, a life, the sun 

A knife, a death, the end of the run 

And the river bank talks of the waters of March.

It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart.

Click here to hear my favorite version, a studio recording with Antonio Carlos Jobim (also known as Tom) and Elis Regina sung in Portugese. 

Click here to watch Jobim at the piano singing in English with five wiggly women on backup. 

Or click here to listen to a zippier version sung by Basia.

Memories and Meditations...and Clouds

"Full Moonrise" by Michael Kenna. Chausey Islands, France 2007. Sepia-toned gelatin silver print. Artist proof #2.

 The Tacoma Art Museum is full of surprises. I don't go often, but when I do, I find there is always a show, a gallery, or single piece of art that captures my imagination. This weekend it was "Meditations and Memories," a show of black-and-white photographs by Michael Kenna, an internationally acclaimed English photographer based in Seattle. Kenna doesn't do digital; he uses large-format cameras, film, a dark room, chemicals, and paper. He is known for photographing at night and using long exposures (several hours) to capture the kind of light few of us see and few cameras can capture.

   The photograph (above) is extraordinary and typical of Kenna's works on display at the museum. It is a long exposure of a moon rising--an effort that took several nights to capture the arc of the moon just right. You can sense the depth of time, richness of light, and feeling of balance in his photograph.

   What I love about this photograph is the mercury-like sheen of the water, the thin tracks of the stars, and the moon looking nothing like a moon but possessing that distinctly soft, reflected light that we associate with the moon. And the fact that the soft swelling in the middle of the arc is where the moon passed through cloud. I may be biased, but without that cloud, this photography would be mostly science--here is the arc of the moon. But with the cloud, it is art.

   After an hour among Kenna's photographs, I felt I'd traveled far away and back in time to where slowly gathered nighttime light created places daylight couldn't reach.

   To see more: Michael Kenna

   For info on the exhibit (closing March 24): Tacoma Art Museum

Still Life with Clouds

  When my family and I arrived at a lakeside cabin last Friday night, the sky was threatening: it was dark, clear, and full of stars. I had hoped for a few clouds at least, but no, it promised to be a sunny March weekend in the Pacific Northwest.

I decided to make the most of it by watching the sunrise from the dock the next morning. Maybe I'd see some birds. At 6:30, the sky looked gray and clumpy. I tiptoed outside, to end of the frost-covered dock, into the clouds. 

    The sky and the lake were full of low, soft gray clouds. In between, against the dark hills of the far shore, pillows of mist floated past. Below the mist, the lake held the reflection of the hills, mist, sky, and clouds. I inched my feet to the edge of the dock. I peered down into the lake. 

    The water was clear, but I couldn’t see beyond the surface where the clouds floated and rippled. I let my gaze wander, following the clouds across the lake, into the mist, up the hills to the horizon in front of me where the clouds began and to the imposing wall of firs behind me where the clouds disappeared. I turned and looked at the cozy house whose rooms held my still-sleeping family, whose glass façade held two stories of reflected clouds.

 What were all these clouds? The mist, being mist and not fog, was not strictly a cloud. There were patches of hilltop-hugging stratus. And well above hills were low clouds that appeared in layers, clumpy layers, wispy layers, and wispy clumps. A mix, in other words. I have learned that if I say "a mix," I usually mean stratocumulus.   

  Stratocumulus clouds are the second most officially varied of the ten cloud types (next to altocumulus) and occur in three species, seven varieties, and in colors from white to gray to dark blue-gray. Their shape, arrangement of cloud elements, and their color are all variable. They may arise from the break up of stratus clouds, the spreading out of cumulus clouds, or the remnants of cumulonimbus. They might develop into stratus, cumulus, or altocumulus clouds. They are easy to confuse with stratus, nimbostratus, and altocumulus clouds. Stratocumulus embody cloudiness—they are varied, dynamic, uncommitted, and hard to pin down. Though they are one of the most common clouds in the Pacific Northwest, they have always rebuffed my attempts at identifying them with any certainty in the field—a fact that makes them my favorite problem cloud.  

    So when I write that the mix of early-morning clouds I saw from the dock were stratocumulus, what I meant was that most of the clouds I saw in the hour I was watching seemed to behave like stratocumulus. What does this even mean? It means that I did my best and, once I had done my best, I moved on. Someone else’s best might have turned my stratocumulus into stratus or altocumulus and perhaps with good reason. Here are mine.  

    My stratocumulus appeared to be undecided about their altitude. One moment they seemed low enough to be stratus or fog—a form they could have metamorphosed from earlier in the morning. The next moment they seemed high enough to be considering a future as altocumulus. During the forty-five moments I watched them from the dock, they never did scream stratocumulus.

   It wasn’t that kind of a morning anyway.

   Everything was quiet and fluid.

   It was time to move on. 

The pale sky took on a pink tinge.

I isolated one wispy puff of cloud in the sky and then tried to find its match in the lake. Other than being a mirror image, what, I wondered, were the differences in the two clouds? Did the reflection of the clouds in the lake reveal something about the clouds that was hidden in the sky? I thought I remembered something about the tricks polarized sunlight, refraction, and reflection played on the human eye, but couldn’t recall the details just then.

  I caught the wobbly call of single loon. I watched three fly low across the water in front of me.

   The turned the clouds a bright white on their east side and cast gray shadow on their west. The once-flat clouds took on dimension and depth.

   I looked down at my sandaled feet. I stood in a circle—a small circle my feet had melted in the frost-covered wooden dock. Maybe in the summer when the dock is warm I will dive into this lake and into the clouds.

   The sun began to glint over the ridge to my right. I looked west and saw the tall trees that caught the first light. When the sun reached my feet, I decided, I would go inside, make a cup of coffee, rattle around, wake everyone up and lure them outside to greet the day. I had no idea how quickly the sun would travel across the lake. I was in no rush. 

   I heard a kingfisher in the distance. I watched a bald eagle fly from behind me toward the opposite shore. A dozen small birds twittered above the lake, turning together like schooling fish. A raven called from the ridge behind me saying something in a language I felt I should know.

  The clouds seemed intent on becoming something more simple and distinctive. Had my stratocumulus become cumulus or had they been cumulus all along in a different light? 

 My feet were in sunlight at 7:15. I turned go inside. I had already lived an entire day. 

Everything else was going to be gravy, icing, gilt, luxury. 

Photo courtesy MD Ruth

Meter-ology

   I now officially need reading glasses.

   Remember my last blog posting in which I provided a handy equation for determining the bases of cumulus clouds--H=ST-DP x 125 (height = the difference between surface temperature and dew point multiplied by 125? Well, there was a tiny six-letter word after that H in my meteorology book that I didn't see--meters. To figure out the height in feet, you have to multiply by 228.

   Ooops!

Perhaps this textbook publisher should consider Large Type editions....

   Funny, last weekend, my husband and I were out hiking and looking at clouds and trying to estimate their height. There was a perfect batch of cumulus clouds over Olympia on Sunday and once we logged onto the National Weather Service website to find the current temperature and dew point, we did our multiplication and declared the clouds over us to be 825 feet high. It seemed low, but I had just posted the equation on my blog so I knew it was correct. Well, it wasn't. The clouds were 875

meters

high. Recalculating this in feet, we have 1,916 feet. That's more like it, footwise.

....or I should consider wearing reading glasses.

  We did see lower clouds that day--stratus clouds--clinging to tops of the Black Hills west of Olympia. But the equation I have provided here (and in my earlier posting) does not work for stratus (layer) clouds. It works only for cumulus clouds--ones that form when warm air rises and cools--and it works best on a sunny day in the afternoon. We guessed that the stratus clouds were about 500 feet high. We had no idea really how high the Black Hills were, though we look at them pretty much every day. Our USGS topo sheets showed the ridge of the Black Hills where we had seen the clouds to be 600 feet high. Now we know.

   Because you are reading my blog and not meteorologist Cliff Mass's, I know you prefer relatively simple, Accidental Naturalist-style explanations. Here is mine: Rising air cools 10°C for every 1000 meters of altitude (fine: 50° F for every 3,300 feet). The temperature at which water vapor in the air condenses into liquid water (dew point temperature) drops 2°C for every 1000 meters of altitude (36°F for every 3,300 feet). So, for every 1000 meters of rise, air temp and dewpoint temp drop steadily, but get 8°C closer.

  This is beginning to sound like a word problem involving two people driving at different speeds on the same road--who arrives at grandma's house first?

   And because word problems are math, I am having a hard time understanding how to get to the magic number 125 or 288. Here is the explanation offered in my meteorology book:

"Rising surface air with an air temperature and dew point spread of 8°C would produce saturation and a cloud at an elevation of 1000 m. Put another way, a 1°C difference between the surface air temperature and the dew point produces a cloud base at 125 m."

 To give you an example of how I handle word problems, I once "helped" my son solve one in which he was asked to provide the dimensions of a chain-link dog enclosure using 70 feet of fencing. I knew how to calculate area--length x width--so I told him to get a dacschund and build a 1' x 70' enclosure.

   So, while I figure out the math and why  we can calculate the height of cumulus clouds, enjoy trying it yourself, keeping your and meters separate. Maybe one day we won't be so afraid of meters--a meter is really just a yard and so much easier to visualize than feet or miles when it comes to clouds.