The Cloudman

Short post today - I’m typing this on my phone in the middle of a 0:00-4:15am volunteer shift at Grey Fox bluegrass festival. It’s 3 in the morning now and I’m getting sleepy.

I want to share some thoughts about John A. Day, aka the Cloudman. I came across his Book of Clouds at a yard sale the other week and picked it up to use for a collage. It’s a big hardcover filled with glossy pictures and descriptions of all kinds of cloud formations, optical effects, and other meteorological phenomena. 

I wasn’t planning on caring about the book itself; I was just going to cannibalize its pictures. But it turns out John Day is kind of awesome! He started his career as a meteorologist for PanAm airlines. Then he became a professor, got a PhD, and started writing general-audience books about clouds. The more I read, the more I was struck by how much he loved not just the science but also the art of cloudwatching. The Book of Clouds includes advice on how to photograph clouds, a history of cloud science, and, most charmingly, a list titled “Ten Reasons to Look Up.” It’s a beginner’s guide to appreciating natural beauty, and I think Dr. Day’s philosophy works for anything in the world.

Cutting up Dr. Day’s words to assemble my own started to feel crazy: I don’t think I can come up with anything more beautiful than the cloudman, who dedicated his life and career to sharing his love and appreciation of the sky. So my collage is just his words and his pictures (landscape, house, and bike), edited minimally, with a little train I took from a magazine ‘cause I thought it fit nicely.

Here’s a link to his website, which is just as endearing as his book.

I have some related thoughts about fostering wonder and curiosity as a preschool teacher, but those will have to go somewhere else.

By the way, the sky has been ridiculous the past few days from all the wildfire smoke. Driving to upstate New York today was bizarre - the sun was blood-red and massive right in front of me the whole time on I-90. Beautiful and scary.

Green River Festival

Last weekend Esti and her friend Rosi and I drove out to Green River Festival in Greenfield, MA.

On the way out we picked up a hitchhiker named Eli. I was pretty excited to finally see one and was kind of hoping for a crazy story, but it turned out he was a pretty boring guy: "no offense," he told me, but the first rule of hitchhiking is you can't look like a dirty hippie. He was a high school teacher from Florida who hitchhiked every summer for the love of the game and said his goal was to inspire faith in humanity. At the moment he was on his way to a jam band festival in New Hampshire. Frankly, ours sounded more fun than his! We took him about 50 miles on route 2.

I'm still glad we met him though. I put on Crosby, Stills & Nash and he sang along, and we talked about growing up in the suburbs, his philosophy curriculum, and his thoughts on religion (vehemently opposed to it). And anyway, I figured picking up a hitchhiker would be good karma: Esti and I didn't have a place to sleep lined up for Saturday night and were hoping to pitch a tent on the yard of some good Samaritan in Greenfield.

I met a couple different people who offered to find some space for us, but we ended up staying on the on-site camping plot of two lovely people from New York City. One of them was wearing a Main Era hat, so we started talking and it turned out they had extra space next to their tent. I think needing somewhere to stay ended up being a good thing - Esti and I chatted with them for a couple hours at the campsite before bed and it was one of the best parts of the weekend. Safe to say the hitchhiker karma paid off - thanks Eli :)

There were other wonderful people at the festival too. Our new campsite friends told us about how cool the campground coordinator was, so I came over to meet her the next morning and ended up doing some odd jobs for her around camp before the music kicked off. Shoutout Lynne! She really was awesome - we ended up having dinner together later, and it turns out she writes young adult fiction and manages bluegrass bands when she's not helping orchestrate music festivals.

I also spent a lot of time with a group of friends who knew each other from college: we started throwing a frisbee around on Saturday morning and I ended up tagging along with them for much of the weekend, playing cards and hacky sacking and so on. I almost waited with them at the barricade for Wednesday and Geese, but got tired after a couple hours and went to catch some other sets. The music was great too, by the way. It just seems less important than the people right now.

The whole weekend felt pretty magical. 

On Blogging

I’ve been reading my mom’s old blog recently…

It’s fun to look at photos of little me, but my favorite part is the glimpses of her in the writing. She used to document me like a zoologist! Lots of little observations, transcribed dialogue, and musings about my developing social emotional skills and sense of ethics. The dialogues are my favorite: conversations from 2011 feel like they could have happened between us today, and it's comforting to be reminded that my relationship with my mom goes back, essentially unchanged, to before I can remember. I'd like to think I'm a bit more polite these days, though... I have a lot to say about reading the old posts, but I don't think that debrief needs to go here.

Anyway, so why a blog? I like sharing parts of my life online, and I like seeing what other people are doing. Blogging seems like a good way to share my thoughts in more detail than would make sense on instagram. I want to put my thoughts out into the world both because my friends might be interested in what I'm up to, and because the process of drafting a post might help me process things more deeply. I don't plan to post on here super often, but I want a place to recount experiences to share them and preserve them for posterity when I feel like it. I've been getting into documenting my life and the time I spend with people I care about over the past couple years; this is another experiment on that front. 

On a less personal note, I think the cultural moment is ripe for blogs to come back. Algorithmic curation has completely taken over the way we engage with things online, and it feels like people are getting sick of it. Everyone I know my age uses instagram and resents how they use it. As online content becomes less and less genuine, I think (and hope) that the desire to escape algorithms will grow. I had a little rant written about how the profit-driven nature of the internet combined with algorithmic curation warps the nature of the content that we are all seeing online, but I think 'nuff said. Basically, the only people I want to see on social media are people I know for real.

Blogs seem like a good way to choose whose thoughts you are receiving online: either you visit a URL or you sign up for an email list - there's no algorithm in the way. More musicians have been making mailing lists and I think that's awesome. Maybe someday I won't need instagram to find out about shows, or to keep up with people I don't regularly talk to.

I don't intend to start a movement here, but I do hope for my own sake that my friends start blogging, even if you don't post much, or make elaborate posts, or post anything besides some photos now and then. I want to hear from you. Text me if you see a cool bug! 

 

- Henry ❤️