Runnels of
rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles
into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks. The sky
is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is clear.
The summer showers leave no wake.
Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August
weather. Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs
about the lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away
harmlessly. Sometimes one has the good fortune from a
heather-grown headland to watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air.
Out over meadow or lake region begins a little darkling of the
sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a smokiness such as spirits
materialize from in witch stories.
It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret
canons. Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind
comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull
lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such
rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do,
ploughing storms that alter the face of things. These come
with thunder and the play of live fire along the rocks. They come
with great winds that try the pines for their work upon the seas
and strike out the unfit. They shake down avalanches of splinters
from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden floods like battle
fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and boulders. They
would be kind if they could, but have more important matters. Such
storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not rain,
rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After
such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles
away is white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.
All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in
the geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I
remember one night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by
the houseless cry of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family,
had been buried under a slide of broken boulders on the slope of
Kearsarge. We had heard the heavy detonation of the slide about
the hour of the alpenglow, a pale rosy interval in a darkling air,
and judged he must have come from hunting to the ruined cliff and
paced the night out before it, crying a very human woe. I
remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake made milky
white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed into it
by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly up,
stunned by the shock of the sudden flood.
