The Clouds of Mount St. Helens

     For the past few weeks I have been wondering about the clouds of Mount St. Helens--the volcano that erupted here in Washington State in 1980. I was living on the East Coast, halfway through college, and volcanoes, the Cascade Mountains, and anything west of the Appalachian Mountains were not yet on my radar screen. My first real awareness of the eruption came in 1985, when I was assigned to work with Alaskan writer and photographer Kim Heacox on a "five-years-since" story on the mountain for National Geographic's Traveler magazine. As the researcher and fact-checker for his story, I spent a good six months learning everything I could about Mount St. Helens. Of all the newspaper and magazine stories I read and of all the documentaries I watched about the eruption and aftermath, one image stuck with me: The Cloud.

   The Cloud blasted the heart of Mount St. Helens into the sky that morning of May 18th, and sent ash, dust, pulverized rock, and gasses 16 miles into the stratosphere. The Cloud carried 550-million tons of ash into the sky and then eastward, scattering itself over 22,000-square-miles of land. The Cloud turned days into nights, suffocated the unlucky, stranded motorists, and clogged air filters. The Cloud also unleashed a flood of adjectives in the media--cataclysmic, catastrophic, choking, steaming, smothering, devastating, awesome, scorching, blasting, spewing, churning, roiling, darkening, searing, terrible, malevolent, apocalyptic--none of which, of course, come close (even in combination) to describing the sight of this natural wonder. Their inadequacy aside, the adjectives used by the media as well as eye witnesses, betray the viewers' feelings of anger, horror, and some personal affront. Mount St. Helens was anthropomorphized into a living monster whose fury and destructive forces were somehow directed toward human beings.
   I never felt this way about The Cloud, perhaps because of my physical and emotional distance from Mount St. Helens. Or perhaps because this isn't how I think about natural events, no matter how tragic the loss of life and property.  The Cloud, the lateral blast, the pyroclastic flows manifested themselves without intention or regard for consequences. And just recently I learned of the silver lining of The Cloud: nitrogen.
  The Cloud was full of gasses--sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, ozone. During its initial upward blast, The Cloud produced its own static electricity and lightning bolts. According to scientists, the lightning charged the nitrogen in the ammonia and ozone. When the ash fell to the newly scorched ground, this  nitrogen--an essential plant nutrient--fell to earth with it. Emerging plants such as pearly everlasting and fireweed may have benefited from this windfall nitrogen while the nitrogen-fixing lupines became reestablished.
  Doesn't this change the way you see The Cloud in the photograph above?

  I wrote in a previous blog about a Science Cafe talk given in Olympia by forest canopy biologist Nalini Nadkarni. In her talk, Nadkarni described how epiphytes intercepted nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous, sodium, calcium, magnesium, etc.) brought into the Costa Rican rainforests by fog and mist. I wondered if the fog and mist (and rain for that matter) flowing from the Pacific Ocean to Mount St. Helens are similarly nutrient rich and are playing a role in the recovery of the forest ecosystem there. I imagined the lowliest of clouds scurrying in from the coast, carrying their microscopic feast to the hungry, parched mountain. I imagined seedlings and saplings and flowerlings drinking in tiny droplets of nourishment.
   And I imagined the millions of people who come to see the crater, the emerging dome, a puff of steam perhaps at Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument...and see a mountain bathed in mist and clouds. I would love to think they would not be disappointed, but happy (even ecstatic) instead knowing that, though their view is obscured, the mountain is getting the attention it needs from the clouds.
   With these ideas in mind, I drove south on a glorious sunny day last week to see what I could see of Mount St. Helens. Here she is, head in the clouds, reinventing herself drop by drop.

Lenticular Clouds in My Inbox

   Every week or two, over the past several months, cloud-spotting friends have kindly sent me e-mails with attachments of some very beautiful clouds hovering over Mount Rainier. The clouds are known as altocumulus lenticularis, lens- shaped clouds also known as "lennies" or "flying saucer clouds."

   Each e-mail includes the same set of photographs--taken from around Tacoma. Each e-mail, forwarded to me, has been forwarded to my friends--from a colleague, a friend, or in one recent case, a "cousin in Greece via my father in Colorado." The source of the photographs is unclear. I would love to know who initiated the e-mailing of this batch of photos. I would love to thank them for starting this wave of e-clouds, for moving these phenomenal clouds around the globe in a way the Jet Stream cannot. And I would like to thank my friends for sending them along to me.

  Here is the phenomenon:  These clouds form when stable, moist air moving on a moderate wind is forced to rise upward over a mountain. The air condenses as it rises up the windward flank, forms a visible cloud, and then begins to dissipate as it sinks on the leeward flank. These clouds form over mountain peaks, notably in Washington State, over Mount Rainier. If you are visiting Mount Rainier National Park on a day when these clouds are out, watch them with your binoculars; it may look like the cloud is hovering over the peak, but you can see the edges where the cloud actually forms and dissipates to create this illusion.

   Speaking of illusions, in 1947, a business man named Kenneth Arnold, started the UFO craze by reporting to the Associated Press that he had seen "saucer-like" objects from his small plane as he flew over Mount Rainier. The rest is "history."

   So, for your enjoyment, here are is the set of well-traveled altocumulus lenticularis. All photos are of Mount Rainier except the last one,which is a stunning Lennie over Mount St. Helens before the 1980 eruption. 

 

NEXT BLOG:  Mount St. Helens and the Cloud of 1980

Friends in High Places

I've just returned from a trip to the East Coast to see for myself what the clouds had done to my home landscape of Northern Virginia this winter: plenty. Though I missed the brunt of the "Snowmageddon" storms, I was still able to walk in knee-deep snow left by armies of icy clouds and enjoy one snowball fight. On my flight home, my plane flew over the Shenandoah River Valley. On clear days, this feature is easy to recognize from the air as two mostly parallel mountain ridges form what looks like an enormous bathtub with a river running down the middle. But last Saturday, the skies were cloudy and obnubilated (see below) the ground. 

What I saw instead were clouds--altocumulus lenticularis (pictured below). These are the "flying saucer" clouds that may form in the lee of a mountain or ridge.

Mount Rainier is famous for these clouds, which some say are responsible for generating the national UFO craze in the 1940s. They are a familiar sight here in Washington State and even have a nickname--Lennies.

(I love being on a first-name basis with the clouds.) Until Saturday, I had never see Lennies in Virginia, where I spent most of my life.  Having learned recently how these clouds form made it possible for me to deduce that my westbound plane was over the Shenadoah Mountains--that the clouds were forming as moist air rose up the western flanks of the mountains (not visible, but at the right edge of the photo). In a break in the clouds I could see that the clouds were hovering over the meandering Shenandoah River. Quite a sight!

The night after I returned home, I got a Cloudspotter Alert call from a friend urging me to go outside to look at what the full moon and clouds had done to the night sky. It was beautiful and surreal. With my dinky digital camera ISO set on 1600, I captured the image below. It's pretty pixely, but the camera actually picked up more detail that my eye.

I love hearing from friends and neighbors about what's going on in the skies. Many call with "weird" cloud sightings that send me running, biking, or driving out with my camera to enjoy the fleeting phenomenon. As I spend more time inside writing my cloud book these days, it's great to know there are cloudspotters with cell phones out there. Thanks Bonnie for "obnubilate" and Sarah for the Full Moon Clouds. Keep those calls and text messages coming!

Ch'i of Clouds

 I wrote last month about cloud painting and party ideas from the Mustard Seed Garden Catalogue of Painting—the 17th-Century manual of Chinese brush painting.

I was so intrigued by the lessons on painting and life, that I felt compelled to get a copy of the book myself. My local public library did not have this book in their holdings, so I requested a copy through their Interlibrary Loan Service. Less than a week later, a pristine copy of the book arrived from The Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick.

I scanned the Table of Contents for the chapter on clouds, but found no such chapter. The two-page index listed only the names of Chinese master painters and calligraphers. I looked at the photocopied pages on cloud painting that my mother-in-law had mailed me in December. And then I found these two pages in my book at the end of a section called the "Book of Rocks." I found it odd that clouds were considered rocks and even more odd that the two pages my mother-in-law sent me were the only two pages on clouds in the book.

To me, clouds and rocks were nothing alike. One is earthbound, mostly permanent, solid, hard-edged, dark, often linear, jagged, made of minerals and covered with trees; the other is skybound, transient, vaporous, soft-edged, rounded, sometimes linear or stratified, made a water or ice, and were unfettered, untouched, and unadorned by anything but sunlight. But there were the clouds, both the “small-hook” and “large-hook” style of clouds, in the middle of Rocks.

To my Western eyes, the small- and large-hook style clouds look nothing like clouds. They are composed of short wriggling lines that look like, well, worms crawling across the surface of a rippling stream. There was nothing puffy or vertical or cloudy about them. What did look like clouds, however, were the rocks. The first page of the Book of Rocks features five rocks that are the spitting image of five perfect cumulus clouds (left). Five perfect little cumulus humilis floating in space on the white page. There is nothing to ground them—no tuffs of grass, layer of duff, or suggestion of earth. All five of these rock-shaped clouds are darkly shaded on one side to give them depth and dimension. I am pretty sure they are clouds. I look to the text for an explanation.

"In estimating people…” it begins (a beginning that tells me I am not going to get an answer about my cloud-rock debate)… “their quality of spirit (ch’i) is as basic as the way they are formed; and so it is with rocks, which are the framework of the heavens and of earth and also have ch’i. That is the reason rocks are sometimes spoken of as yun ken (roots of the clouds).”

I stop there. Roots of the clouds. I love this idea! What does it even mean? I cannot even picture roots of clouds. Well, actually I can: a flat and treeless landscape scattered with evenly placed boulders as far as the eye can see, scattered cumulus clouds above, lots of very long, slimy tree roots connecting each boulder to a cloud. It is a surreal and hideous image, a literal and very Western scene. Something Frida Kahlo, Hieronymous Bosch, or Salvador Dali might have painted after seeing a kelp forest. I read on.

“Rocks with ch’i are dead rocks, just as bones with the same vivifying spirit are dry, bare bones. How could a cultivated person paint a lifeless rock?”

The “cultivated” persons I know have done some pretty offensive things in their lives, but painting lifeless rocks has not been one of them. Imagine a time when, to be considered cultivated, you had to paint rocks with ch’i. Imagine a time when you would even ask such a question—How could a cultivated person paint a lifeless rock?—and not get ushered into a psychiatrist’s office.

The next passage, written about rocks, applies equally to clouds—despite their very obvious differences.

“One should certainly never paint rocks without ch’i . To depict rocks without ch'i, it must be sought beyond the material and in the intangible. Nothing is more difficult. If the form of the rock is not clear in ones’ heart (-mind) and therefore at one’s finger tips…the picture can never be completely realized. I have, however, at long last learned that this is not so difficult to achieve.”

I make a note to use this in my next inspirational speech to my sons: It is not difficult to achieve something that can never be completely realized. Now for the E-Z method.

“There are not many secret methods in the painting of rocks. If I may sum it up in a phrase: rocks must be alive.”

My skin tingles and I remember a poem by Mary Oliver, about rocks sleeping in her hand. I have a recording of this poem on a CD in my car. I close The Mustard Seed Garden Catalogue of Painting, pack my laptop and some cloud-painting books in my briefcase, and drive downtown. Mary reads to me from the back seat:

Some Things Say the Wise Ones

Some things, say the wise ones, who know everything,

are not living. I say,

You live your life your way and leave me alone.

I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they

are afraid of being left behind; I have said Hurry, hurry!

And they have said, Thank you,we are hurrying.

About cows, and starfish, and roses there is no

argument. They die, after all.

But water is a question, so many living things in it,

bt what is it itself, living or not? Oh gleaming

generosity, how can they write you out?

As I think this I am sitting in the sand beside

the harbor. I am holding in my hand

small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.

Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.

I listen to this poem four times on my way to my writing spot overlooking the water, the gleaming generosity. I listen to this poem and wonder who Mary Oliver’s ‘wise ones’ are. Certainly not the authors of the “Book of Rocks.”

I spend the afternoon looking at the water, the rain, the ripples on the puddles, and a book by American artist and illustrator Eric Sloane (1905-1985). Sloane wrote and illustrated some thirty-eight books in his lifetime. Skies and the Artist: How to Draw Clouds and Sunsets (1950) is one his first. As a non-artist, non-meteorologist, it is one of my favorites. He begins this primer for art students with a discussion of cloud anatomy. Except for the line about ice cream, I could have been reading out of the Mustard Seed Catalogue:

“Although clouds appear motionless, they are really slow explosions. Whether single (cumulus puffs) or solid flat layers (stratoform) they puff and boil continually…..therefore don’t make cloud-masses look like melting mounds of ice cream but like living shapes in graceful action. Do think of cloud action first, then think of cloud shape and outline because shape depends on movement.”

“To put grace into a cloud you must realize that it is a living thing, either in the process of building up or of disintegration.”

Sloane, a self-taught painter and illustrator, has not only expressed the ch’i of clouds, but also something of their yin and yang.

What a day! What a good day. What an enlightening cloudy gray day. Thank you painters and poets, cultivated persons, truly wise ones, keepers of life, seekers of ch’i, stewards of grace.

And the next day, in the pouring rain, I went hiking with my husband along a tributary of the Skokomish River in Olympic National Forest. The nimbostratus clouds were thick overhead, but the forest was drenched in the bright greens of moss, fern, hemlock, and cedar. We took a sidetrail, marked "Confluence" and here is what we saw--living things: