It happened last night.
Woke up this morning and winter had snuck in. Winter! And I had not yet even finished the requisite autumnal post.
Snow down to 3,000 meters. Above image shows in the foreground two valleys at 600 meters. The valleys drain the north side of the Jungfrau Massif, part of the Berner Oberland in the Swiss Alps. If you magnify, you can see Jungfrau, Monch and Eiger in the left center background.
If I could…and then the fairy appeared before me. Yeah, in my dreams!
If I could write with the emotion and mystery of these clouds moving ever so slowly but always with magnificent beauty, incredible balance.
And challenges. These clouds offer visual, emotional and intellectual challenges that encourage science to escape Pandora’s box, something I’ve never done.
The name says it all.
End of summer;
But, a last breath of spring-like beauty.
Did I discover the end of summer or the last remnant of spring?
The beauty overwhelms the labels.
Weeds or Wild Flowers?
This is a discussion, a debate, an argument that never fades away.
Today, on a walk, I came across these beautifully flowering plants on the edge of a parking lot. Made me think. Made me remember all the discussions, debates and arguments with colleagues and government authorities.
But then I thought that any time someone plants seeds or ‘makes’ a garden, it is a statement that says yes, I have free time. Yes, I have disposable income. We could easily infer that such a person is ‘well-off’. Nice place to be…well-off in a garden, isn’t it?
Too much thinking for me. I’ll go back to my walk.
Railing about what?
Once upon a time…and then it was yesterday…and you are reading this today.
In a land of mountain trains–funiculars, cable cars and narrow gauge cogwheel trains. They are slow and they get you high.
Why? Why get high?
I’ll let the following photos tell the story. You will be in the Bernese Highlands of the Jungfrau Region, the northern pre-mountains, above 2,000 meters in the Swiss Alps. Why build these mechanical contraptions to get high?
Here are the trains that get you high.
Passenger cars–note narrow gauge and cogwheel. Start at 600 meters, finish at 2,300 meters.
Passenger cars and engine–small and strong–electric power.
Engine close up–attached in front of the engine is a cart for transporting goods and construction materials.
Once you are high…the air is thin, fresh, cool and the distances…magical.
Mountains–Eiger, Monch, Junfrau with the Mannlichen gipfel amidst the clouds in the foreground.
Paths to explore, paths for discovering.
Discoveries.
Going deep in.
Can’t get enough.
Deep in the back row of the upper, upper balconies, which are all full today, you can do whatever you want because no one will see you. Can you hear the sonata?
Clouds fill the upper balconies.
…something completely different…speaks for itself…
From a newspaper,
‘A livestock owner, who staked out his pen in a bid to apprehend the thief responsible for his regularly ‘disappearing’ milk, stumbled upon a couple in a compromising position instead.
Unable to pinpoint the reason his goat’s milk vanished everyday, the owner deduced it could be the handiwork of a thief. Crouched in a corner inside the pen, the owner made sure he could clearly watch the entrance and pounce on the thief when needed.
An hour later, a GMC Suburban vehicle stopped near the entrance. Stepping out of the vehicle, an Asian driver and a woman entered the pen and hastened into a room located on the far side.
Waiting awhile, the owner tiptoed towards the room expecting to catch the couple pilfering his goat’s milk. He found no thief and as he barged into the room he froze in his tracks.
Right in front of him, the couple were engaged in a sex session. Shocked to see an uninvited stranger they jumped up in surprise and tried to flee.
Refusing to budge without an explanation, the owner demanded they produce their identity cards that revealed their respective nationalities. The amorous couple further disclosed that they used his pen as a regular rendezvous for their animated meetings and also helped themselves to the available goat milk.
When the owner insisted on producing them at a police station, the woman burst into tears pleading to be forgiven. The Asian too followed suit. Not wanting to blow the issue into scandalous proportions, the owner let the couple off the hook.
*end of story*
My comment–happened in Kuwait twenty some odd years ago, when reporters just told a good story without trying to take a political position or without trying to change the world. I found the story fun to read and without heartburn. Can’t remember the last news story I’ve read this year that came without heartburn. 🙂
I did some landscape stuff while in Kuwait.
Not far from Basra, and with a whole lot of Iranian, Iraqi and Palestinian influence.
And then time passed.
How can I find my way home?
Gentian Cluster
Year after year, I have searched for the invigorating blue of Gentian wildflowers in the Jungfrau Region of the Berner Oberlands. This year was banner.
Previous years I needed microscopic vision to find the odd one here or there. But this year…clusters everywhere! Left me breathless–how fortunate.
Gentiana acaulis at 2,000 meters above sea level in the sunny alps on north facing mountain ridges.
What are landrace clouds? I made it up. Combination of words to describe the reality of cloud appearance in my neighborhood.
My neighborhood. According to the Swiss National Meteorological office, my Swiss neighborhood is the Northern Alps, the north facing slopes of the northernmost range of Alps in Switzerland. Using more common tourist and environmentally friendly vocabulary, my neighborhood is in the Jungfrau Region of the Berner Oberland around Interlaken. I live in the north-facing drainage basin of the famous Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau mountain triumvirate.
Now all that aside, over my years of walking this neighborhood, I have noticed that barely observable, minimal fluctuations in temperature, humidity, pressure and wind create quite dramatic formation and dissolution of very low level clouds. Please do not confuse them with fog. For a patient viewer, a dance reveals itself. And where there is dance, there is music. Not in astronomical time, but in real time. See it. Feel it. Hear it.
Unmistakeable to a person on foot.
So for me, landrace clouds are very specific, locally generated occurrences. That is my starting point. That is real. Then the fiction begins. I call it fiction because of the reality that what we call ‘fixed’ or ‘settled’ science is not really fixed or settled or permanent. I like working and writing on the edge of the fixed because every edge is fuzzy and invites exploration, as do these landrace cloud phenomena.
I ask myself, what really happens at the point where a cloud begins its formation in touch with the earth? My response is a bit alchemical, a bit old school. I theorise that point as the interaction of earth, air, water…kind of special already, no? But what about ether? What happens at the moment of generation and the final moment of dissolution?
So, I go hunting in my neighborhood for generation points of landrace clouds. Following are eleven images from recent forays.
1. Here is a generic shot of clouds in my neighborhood. Note the lake(water), the mountains(earth) and the sky(air). Note the cloud varieties. Anybody sense the presence of ethereal?
2. Here is a closer view showing certain cloud interactions with the earth.
3. In this partially zoomed view, note the implied dynamics of the landrace cloud edges.
4. In this zoomed view it is clear to see the scale of the landscape and the recently generated landrace cloud.
5. And now the landrace cloud hunt begins–first person–on the ground–in your face.
6. I learned the landrace cloud dynamics first hand. They always move. Their edges always change. The harder I looked, the further away they were.
7. On another day, I learned that if I just stood still long enough, the landrace clouds came to me. But on this day no such luck.
8. Without the opportunity to be at the point of cloud generation, I had so satisfy the walk by appreciating such details as here.
9. Spring wild flowers in Alp pastures never cease to amaze.
10. But as I was looking for the landrace cloud points of generation, I saw this hut at the edge of the forest.
11. And at the peak of the roof, protecting this hut, was…
All of the above represent a ‘typical’ walk in my neighborhood. And that is why fiction is just too close to fact.
