JULY 18, 2022 – Over the weekend, while sitting on our dock, I watched cumulus clouds billowing upward over the lake. Earlier, when our six-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter was doing likewise and seeing dragons and unicorns, she’d asked, “How are clouds made?” I explained that when the earth warms by day, the moist, heated air near the surface rises until it hits cooler air high above the ground. The result is condensation taking the form of dragons, unicorns, and a thousand other shapes. By the end of my elementary explanation, Illiana was on to spiders—gazillions of which reside under the skies of northwest Wisconsin.
While I watched the closest example of rising warm air meeting cold air, I “saw” my own version of fantasyland—a castle grander than “Mad” King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein. As I watched invisible artisans work their fast-motion magic, I recalled having read somewhere the questionable assertion that an average cloud exists for less than two minutes. Poppycock the size of Neuschwanstein! This fantasy cloud was building “mass” and volume at such a rate, I felt confident it wasn’t a “two-minute cloud” but a child’s dream morphing into a future Jovian storm.
I kept an eye on “Cumulus Neuschwanstein” and scanned the sky for other interesting clouds. Off to the east, I saw three behemoths. Though joined at the base, the giants retained their individual personalities. They too billowed ferociously into the blue, but drifting slowing away, they posed no threat to my immediate surroundings.
I studied the trio carefully—blinding sunlight reflecting off their upper reaches; ominous shadows created by expanding outcroppings, and . . . scowling faces casting doom over their quarter of shadowed earth. They reminded me of Austria, Prussia, Russia—the European powers that partitioned Poland in the late 18th century, not once or twice, but thrice. I imagined Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, and Maria-not-Mother Theresa filling the sky over Poland with the threat of annihilation. (After the Third Partition in 1795, Poland disappeared from the map—and didn’t reappear until 1921, only to be torn asunder again less than a generation later.)
After pondering this image for a moment, I checked back on the monster cloud that had loomed nearly overhead. What?! While I’d been distracted by “Austria, Prussia, and Russia,” “Nimbus Neuschwanstein” had collapsed into a harmless puff. Nothing like the Bavarian castle was anywhere to be seen. More than two minutes had passed—five or eight, perhaps—but still, the once big cloud was all but gone.
The “Partitioning Powers,” meanwhile, had moved farther east with diminishing effect. When shortly thereafter, Illiana reappeared on the dock—chattering happily with water goggles strapped on tightly—“Frederick, Catherine, and Maria Theresa” had vanished altogether. Even the most powerful people in the world, I thought, are still . . . people, who, at their longest, grow old, white, and wispy. Like those scowling, towering clouds, their threat eventually dissipates. Newly formed power puffs will strut across the sky so high, but they too will turn thin, then disappear.
Before they vanish, however, clouds rain life upon our planet and give dragons, unicorns, and storybook castles to our dreams.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
