Ridin' on the Storm:

A Brief Meditation on the Cycles of Spring and Missing the Thunder

Ahoy, Travelers!

It’s spring, and that means the April showers are starting to pepper the weekly weather forecasts that pop up on news feeds, weather apps, and the local news. Thankfully it seems Mother Nature is done with bombarding the northeast with countless snow monsters and “bomb cyclones,” and down here in the South, it’s cold front season – meaning it’s the time of year where squall lines are more commonly seen marching across our fair nation, bringing slender blobs of yellow, green and red across Doppler radars near and far alike. Some regions see more extreme weather than others – ranging from flash floods to the occasional tornado – though there is a common factor no matter where you are when the line hits: moisture.

Yesterday in Asheville and the surrounding area, we heard a few rumbles of thunder here and there, we got some gusty winds towards the end of the day, but mostly it just RAINED BALLS. It was some of the heaviest rain I had seen since moving out of New Orleans four years ago. I had forgotten how the storms south of the Mason-Dixon line can seem almost biblical in nature, and yesterday, they did not disappoint. Though the foundation-shattering thunder I more often felt on the bayou did not make much an appearance (which was somewhat of a disappointment), some moments had a certain end-of-days/”two-by-two” feel to them, especially traversing the mountain apexes of eastbound I-26.

I’ve always been a fan of keeping track of the weather, and even more a fan of storms in general. I even was mildly excited each time a hurricane or tropical storm threatened to bear down on New Orleans, though after enduring the relentless rain and wind of Hurricane Isaac back in 2012 – not to mention the resulting six days without electricity – my tune changed a little bit. We didn’t really get thunderstorms in California; rather our winters were stained with parades of days bursting with cold, wet rain … but only the winters – our summers were full of eternal sunshine that crisped the once-green landscapes to a hazy shade of yellow-brown, which on its own looked particularly drab, but against the azure sky of a California July, looked like a modern masterpiece. Witnessing that extreme volume of water yesterday as it fell from the sky, pooling on the roads and drenching the fields and woodland areas around us, I was brought back to soggy mornings hiding away in my apartment in Oakland, as well as those sweaty New Orleans summer days that were pointedly interrupted by daily afternoon deluges that lasted about twenty minutes or so, bring sweet albeit brief relief before turning the city into a veritable sauna.

Cruising down I-26, my attention turned to music (shocking, I know), in particular songs about water in all its many forms – various bodies of water, fogs and mists, and of course, precipitation. Turns out there are quite a bit – much more than I expected – and so I compiled a rather lengthy playlist, all about that little life-giving molecule that breathes the essence of being into every living thing on Earth. It makes up more than two thirds of both our bodies and our planet.

Today the sky cleared as the clouds were chased away by a cold northwestern wind, but the rain will undoubtedly fall again – that we know for sure. But for how much longer will that be a certainty? […Oof, that’s a discussion for another time, Travelers.]

So, whether you’re hunkered down at home waiting out a storm, or floating down a river on a lazy hazy afternoon, or running for the hills to escape an approaching tsunami, this is the mix for you.