A Dyke A Broad #104 The Weather Edition
"I marveled at how his mountain-dwarfed life co-existed with mine, dwarfed by the vast expense of the internet populated by billions of souls chattering like identical gibbons..."
It’s been drizzly here. It’s been sunny. Or cold or sweltering hot. I like to write about the weather—not just as an opening gambit, a conversational bid to grease the rapidly rusting wheels—but because it reminds me of the elemental world, keeping me real, or trying to. It’s an uphill battle.
I like to be the center of things, and resist any knowledge that catapults me to the margins. Still, I have begun to wonder what I am doing, for instance, when I say the word rain. Which somehow masks the fact that fucking water is fucking falling from the sky when we all know it should come from taps, or remain safely on the ground in puddles and lakes.
It might as well be chocolate pudding, as strange as it is for something suddenly to appear out of nothing, and fall on us, taking on a form which chills us to the bone, returns paper to the fibrous mash it comes from. Lifts cars from their parking spaces and deposits them on roofs miles away.
Wind, meanwhile, is restless air. It has its spirit, insists. Blows hot then cold like my humor. Rattles the windows. Elegantly stirs my hair, or rips signs from posts, guillotines trees or extremely unlucky pedestrians. Removes the car planted on the roof, the roof itself, and the walls it sits on. Scours bones clean in the desert with the help of beetles. And the sun.
I don’t pretend to understand any of it, but lately, try to look where weather points. Away from the me that loses itself on the internet, and towards the fleshy me which I regularly neglect, like those two giant tower blocks in my field of vision which aren’t just apartments like ours where we keep the stuff we consume, but refuges from the thing we domesticate with the label weather, pretend is under our control with words like rain. Did you bring an umbrella?
I’ve heard it said turkeys are so stupid that if they’re outside when it rains, they gape up at the water falling from the sky and drown. In this, we are the same as our ancestors seeking out the nearest grove, the nearest cave.
A couple days ago, sitting inside in my uncomfortable chair while it poured outside, I watched a documentary alternating between a shepherd tending his flock and a cow herding cheesemaker who separately continued the tradition of the transhumance, taking their animals from the lowlands in Austria where they wintered, up into the Italian mountains, or was it vice versa, crossing not only landscapes but national borders that did not impress at all the sheep and cows who concentrated on putting their little animal feet solidly on the shifting rocks, wandering off sometimes for a mouthful of grass before a prod from the cow herder, or nip from a collie-like dog, returned them to the path.
The shepherd had dark red hair as thick and wooly as his sheep. He said he liked how the enormous mountains made him feel small, returned him to his place in the scheme of things. And I thought of the two summers I worked at Yellowstone and how arriving on the bus from Kentucky where what we called mountains were really nothing but hills, I gaped at the vast expanses of Montana and Wyoming and found them a relief, creating a horizon where I could be lost, reduced to almost nothing. A mouse, a flea, a speck. I think I’ve mentioned it before, how we climbed to the glaciers on the Tetons. Stood knee-deep in the snow in June, in August. They are probably shrunken themselves. Not the mountains, but the glaciers. Even in nature there are rules. That heat uncaringly melts snow is one of them. The earth is just a big machine.
But as I stared at the guy on the tube, practically glowing with love and awe for the landscape around him, I marveled at how his mountain-dwarfed life co-existed with mine, dwarfed by the vast expense of the internet populated by billions of souls chattering like identical gibbons deranged by the impossible goal it sets for us of authenticity, individuality, with our billion seemingly-separate identities, which all fade the moment we look up from our cellphones which are less the portals to an alternative reality than an alternative to reality even if they bow to it. My own iphone, the manufacturers claim, is dust and water resistant, able to withstand one meter of water (3.3 feet) for up to 30 minutes, though users are sternly warned, “intentional water exposure should continue to be avoided.”
A Sample of Real Life Mediated by My Fake One
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,
Kale E