WEATHER UNDERGROUND
Ed Barna
This being the Fourth of July, a time to consider what it means to be an American, I want to share a way that anyone online can be part of a worldwide community. I do care about this country, but the idea of a nation is indivisible from the existence of other nations, and the better we know and the more we appreciate other countries, the more we will appreciate and the better we will know our own.
“Everyone talks about the weather,” goes an old saying, “but no one does anything about it.” Today, we know the last part isn’t true. All our actions influence climate change, and the worldwide community I will momentarily describe shares an in-depth knowledge of this.
In Vermont, though, talking about the weather is still the most common way for strangers to get from grim to grin. Maybe the information exchanged is banal, but as Winston Churchill famously said about negotiations, “Jaw jaw is better than war war.” This northland eye-on-the-sky-speak isn’t just heritage from our predominantly agricultural past, when an old-timer with a deeply intuitive weather sense might indeed have a better understanding of when it was safe to put in seed or to cut hay or go to market. We divide up the land, making our homes our castles, but we share the air--as one contemporary poet puts it in a piece about the seeming humanity of the moaning and crying of a strong night wind, “we go all the way to the wind/ and the wind goes everywhere else.”
Which brings us to Weather Underground. The name of this online gathering, accessible by all at www.wundergound.com, comes ultimately from a Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in which he raps (he was a pioneer rap innovator, in case you hadn’t noticed) “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The political thrust of that line did not go unnoticed by a faction of the leftist Yippies who, frustrated by the failure of peaceful methods to end the Vietnam War, decided to try violent upheaval—under the name The Weather Underground.
Today’s Weather Underground is a peaceable lot, exception for the violence implied in some of the storm pictures that people from all around the world sometimes post on the site. Under the categories of Very Important Pictures (weather disasters like the recent flooding in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas), Approver’s Choice (subtitled “a bit of inspiration”—good shots, of anything outdoors), Weather, and Outdoors, both amateurs and pros contribute. Aside from some people putting their names on the shots, the participants don’t let copyright considerations block them from letting people make personal use of the medium-resolution photos.
People can email back and forth via the site, or blog, so it has truly become a community. An expert in bird identification will help someone put a name on a rarer species for that area; a pro fotog will give tips to someone who says they’re just beginning and would welcome critiques; and the captions, sometimes quite extensive, give the homebound an opportunity to ride a virtual tour bus. When a regular poster goes silent, there is general concern; right now, for instance, a lot of people are waiting for Lampy, a railroad enthusiast, to post another of his fabulous train-in-operation shots.
“What a unique way to see the world through others’ eyes!” writes kathydee in Ohio, who had sent in 331 pictures—all of which can be viewed, 50 at a time, by clicking on her online handle—of which 11 were Approver’s Choices. One of the latest was a heartbreaking picture of an old coal miner’s two-room disability retirement homestead—a friend of kathydee’s who will no longer bring her blackberries despite his ailments because he just succumbed to them. This site has heart.
Last night I started listing the countries from which pictures had arrived on Weather Underground. With only 12 hours gone, the following have taken part: Montenegro, Latvia, Belize, Croatia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Slovakia (maybe should count as two because Lena from Slovenia is vacationing there), Greece, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Bahrain, Thailand, and the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. I know, the last isn’t a country by legal definition, but for true it is one of the ends of the earth. Russian, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mongolia, and many more have chimed in at other times.
Ends of the earth: there are people who climb mountains and send back their peak experiences; seashore dwellers document the infinite moods of the seascape; veteran wildlife photographers add closeups that no casual picturetaker could ever equal; and stormchasers, that death-defying breed who go after tornadoes and travel TOWARD hurricanes, send images that can be genuinely terrifying. Vermont, be glad you’re in a geographical location where the big storm systems arrive exhausted and panting: there are clouds in the middle states of this country that are enough to make you shake, never mind the storms themselves. Look up superstormchaser Mike Theiss’s glimpses of supercells that look like they arrive with instructions to 1. Open chuck; 2. Insert drill; 3. Tighten chuck; 4. Send pieces flying everywhere and leave a big hole behind.
Spend a year looking at Weather Underground and it’s hard not to believe in climate change. Not “global warming” exactly, because the extra energy that the warming puts into the system drives it to all kinds of extremes. Kansas soaks while Florida burns. London gets hail on July 3 so deep it looks like the sidewalks and streets are deep with snow, while elsewhere you get to see what it’s like driving into a dust storm. At one point earlier this year, a location reported flowers opening two months early, with snow on top of them. Lightning bolts so powerful that the photographer was scared even while in his car. Coldest on record, warmest on record, hurricane winds without a hurricane—meteorologically, it’s a world gone mad.
So, as I implied earlier, there is a serious side to all this weather talk. As quietly as the fog that sometimes swallows half of the Golden Gate Bridge, so that it appears to emerge from a tunnel, the necessary consensus is building.
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