The Lost Clouds

The best night of this last summer I thought a lot about wind. I sat next to a man I had met earlier that night, slightly drunk and slightly stoned, straddling the roof of a doomed shelter. It was a rotting, three sided thing, built from interlocking logs, undoubtedly plucked from the woods surrounding us. It had just celebrated its 44th birthday. Four and half decades of hikers had passed by her nook in the mountains, used her walls for respite from the winds licking the summit of Garfield Mountain, her roof an umbrella from both sun and rain. Thousands had slept within her, and thousands more had simply paused for a break in a long day, letting her hold their packs while they lay down on her planked floor, thankful for something level. But that night, her last, is the only one I shared with her. The following day I shouldered my pack and left, bound for Franconia Ridge, and a modest trail crew of three began to pull nails from her sides.

Garfield Ridge shelter

I sat with the caretaker of the campsite that night, a man whose name I have already forgotten, and contemplated the winds. New England is our continents exhaust. All of the building forces of pressure change, temperature and oceans and mountains, construct and warp and spit out winds that crescendo across the plains and funnel out through northern appalachia. Just as the viscous mechanics of an engine turn over and expel carbon monoxide, so do the mechanics of our earth, forging winds born thousands of miles away, only to eventually slap the back's of the caretaker and myself on top of that shelter.

This is the nature of big things; this is the general flow of continental winds. This is the jet stream. But there are smaller forces too. And sometimes, it's these local manipulators, that twist the wind around their own mountainous contours, that actually effect us more. Such was the case that night. Franconia Ridge lay only a few miles to our west - a massive massif - essentially a colossal granite breakwater to settle the wind. A storm raged, as we could tell by the distant tremble of thunder, on the far side of the ridge. But in it's shadow, the clouds were broken up, too scattered and exhausted by their ride over the rocks to carry enough moisture worth condensing.

At our feet, beyond the walls of the shelter, unfurled the sprawling Pemigewasset valley. The valley floor was quicksand for the clouds that made it there. Born from Pacific thermals, grown over reflective glaciers and the prairie hotbed, ripped from the pull of the jet stream by condensing rain, and gouged by the granite flanks of the appalachians, they now had nowhere to go. Here they swirled, confused, trapped in the valley through heat inversion and Franconia Ridge to the west, and the Presidential Mountains to the east. They looked lost - the adventure of the storm behind them, and the pull of the jet stream above.

"You can see where they divide," the caretaker said. He spread his arms out to take in the show of lost clouds in front of us. "Where all these guys and the jet stream touch." I focused on the night sky, teasing out a thin wafer of cloud high above the valley. This marked the line where the the continental westerlies whipped above, and the clouds below played in the mountains. "Eventually," he continued, "all these little guys here, they'll swell up. Eat up all the moisture in the valley. They'll rise, cool. It'll rain." He turned to look at me, and I thought I noticed a trace of sadness in his eyes. But it was dark, and a cloud had just covered the moon. "But most of the clouds will get so big, they'll be able to cross that barrier, back into the jet stream. If you happen to see it happen, it's a pretty cool thing. It's this big swollen thing, and then one little piece of it, a single tendril, breaks through. And the jet stream is so strong, it sucks the whole thing back up into it. It's dramatic for a second, when it's writhing around, when most of it is still in the valley. And then it's sucked up and starts to gather speed. Then it's spread thin, and eventually just disappears into the sky."

We sat for a while in silence, finishing the joint he had rolled earlier. "Some of them lose it for a while, the jet stream," he finally went on. "But they all find their way back. They have to. It's the nature of things." As night carried on the air on the slopes above us cooled, and began to finger its way down the mountains. Like sluffing snow, the wind grew stronger with gravity, until the avalanching whip of the katabatic winds chilled my new friend and I into getting off of the roof. As I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag that night, fresh socks on my feet, I thought about the winds. I thought about the clouds. I wondered if the clouds in that valley had actually lost the jet stream. Perhaps, my last conscious thoughts wondered, they had wanted to get away. And perhaps maybe a couple would never find their way back.

Before long I was asleep, the last guest of a dying shelter. When I awoke the next morning, to a clear sky and calm winds, I knew I had dreamt in the night. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember of what.

Early morning clouds lost in the trappings of the Pemigewasset