I've looked at clouds from both sides now....

When I meet people for the first time and tell them I just moved here from Portland, OR, they look at me in disbelief.  "Why?" they say, and my stock response is, "For the green chili stew and a library system that will hire me."  They laugh, but retain their skepticism, screened behind polite smiles and small talk about the city.  So many of them have friends and relatives in the Pacific NW, and they commiserate with me about the dryness, the heat, the lack of green.

They don't get it when I tell them I love the high desert.  I love the rocks, in all their fantastical shapes and colors.  Most of all, I love the big sky and the myriad forms the clouds take in that clear blue, the blue that seems to shimmer with light, the blue that goes from sky-blue to deep indigo.

Now, coming from the rainy city, I am no stranger to clouds.  But these clouds are something special.  Arching over a landscape as big and fantastical as themselves, in one day they can range from fluffy popcorn to towering fortresses.  They can be white cotton, scattered on glowing blue background.  They can be cumulonimbus clouds, louring over the mountains, sometimes shot through with lightning, sometimes streaming grey streaks of rain along the desert horizon.  They are so much more than a response to changes in barometric pressure and moisture.

The other day I came out of work into the early evening light.  Directly overhead, the leading edge of a cloud bank stretched in a slanting line across a clear blue sky.  To the east, the Sandia range was buried in grey.  To the west, the city and the desert glowed yellow-orange.  I stood at the demarcation of storm and sun, marveling.

During the monsoon season, the clouds come up quickly and dissipate even more quickly.  In the morning, I can watch the sun rise over the Sandia range, the thin layer of popcorn clouds turning pink, orange-red-purple, grey-white, white.  It's going to be a beautiful sunny day.  10 hours later, the dime-sized rain drops hiss on the hot pavement, splatting out of the overhead grey, heralded by thunder and lightning.  The parking lot becomes a lake, the arroyos and streets, rivers.  Waterfalls from the roof are framed by every window.  Customers huddle by the doorways, looking into the sheets of rain.  "I think I'll look for another book," they say.  Half an hour later, the lakes are rapidly-drying puddles, and a brilliant double rainbow spreads across the east, where the clouds and rain still linger.  The mountains are blue-grey, showing through the prism as a simple clean line.  The end of the rainbow seems close enough to touch.

There are times the clouds seem to be perfectly picked to outline the rocks and hills and reflect the sun.   They have that picturesque thing down.  And even when I am depressed with the petty details of my life, with the things that are not going right, I can't help but take in a deep joyful breath when I look up into those clouds.

My very first flash flood

Yesterday I worked at the Erna Fergusson Library:  it's 15 minutes from my home on a busy street.  The parking lot borders one of the many arroyos that snake down from the Sandia Mountains.  It's a complex engineering project, and I've been wondering how well it works.  I found out yesterday when I left work.

It had been a long day, and I spent my lunch hour trying to reach people in the HR department, so I had not gone outside.  But it was clearly as hot as it had ever been:  materials from the bookdrop radiated heat, and the solar telescopes on the patio were doing a roaring business.  (Sadly, I did not have the time to check them out, but I'm sure the program will be offered at other locations in my upcoming tenure with the Albuquerque library system.)

I sent a final e-mail, paper-clipped all the little notes and calculations, gathered up my stuff, and made tracks for the parking lot.  As I tossed my bags into the passenger seat, I glanced toward the arroyo.  Instead of the usual white cement-lined square ditch, I saw brown water, a few feet below the edge, running quickly from east to west.  A woman and a girl stood on the pedestrian bridge, looking down, and I joined them.

This was the fastest, smoothest, straightest waterflow I've ever seen:  no eddies, no backwater, no floating logs, no ducks.  The surface was littered with lines of light brown sprinkles, leaves and twigs I guessed, but it was moving too fast to know.  I looked east, and noted the entrance of the North Hahn Arroyo:  that arroyo was bone dry and a straight diagonal line in the otherwise smooth surface of the Hahn Arroyo water indicated the different depth where the two arroyos merged.

My fellow gawkers informed me that there had been a thunderstorm in the foothills, and that this was the flash flood from that storm.  Some gray-white clouds still hovered in the east, but where I stood the sky was clear, with a hot afternoon sun.  It was a little spooky, the water was so unnatural.

I drove home and didn't see any signs of storms until I reached Osuna Rd.  Then I noticed fast-drying water in gutters, and Bear Canyon's cement dams had brown water tumbling over them.  By the time I walked over from the apartment, the water was lazily trickling through gaps in the cement, and only the wet sand indicated the spate that had passed through.  Back home, the sidewalks had dried out in the few short minutes I had been gone, but the rocky gardens still held pools of water.  One of the water pipes into the parking lot dripped a few drops, and several large rocks sat in the lot:  another indication of the temporary hydropower.

When D arrived home, an hour after the floods, there was little evidence left of the event.  The air was humid, and a few clouds lingered.  And there were those rocks.

Apparently we are now officially in the monsoon season.