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 about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or
the short, wide-mouthed canons opening eastward on high valleys.
Days when the hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds
came walking on the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath,
rounded and pearly white above.
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