autumn sky. All day
wings beat above it hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in
the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One
wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have
swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of
the tulares.

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the weather
is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity.
When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are on the
levels, sea or sand or plains. There you get only a hint of what is
about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place
under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no stay
nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind have
the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted
grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill
countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure the
pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars,
and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no
harm.

They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings,
and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds
his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water,
and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty
years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the
piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and
the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither the
water nor the snow.

The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention in
storm processes.

Weather does not happen. It is the visible manifestation of the Spirit
moving itself in the void. It gathers itself together under the heavens;
rains, snows, yearns mightily in wind, smiles; and the Weather Bureau,
situated advantageously for that very business, taps the record on his
instruments and going out on the streets denies his God, not having
gathered the sense of what he has seen. Hardly anybody takes account of
the fact that John Muir, who knows more of mountain storms than any
other, is a devout man.

Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered peaks
abo