A Change in the Weather

There’s a Ray Bradbury story that you’ve probably read because I remember reading it in at least two high school English classes, that tells the story of children on a fictional Venus before people knew what Venus was really like. In the story it rains constantly, and then once a year (I think) the rain stops and the world bursts into a short-lived spring and the children in the human colony are able to go and play outside in the sunshine before being confined indoors for another twelve months. The story is about one young girl who was born on Earth (unlike her Venus-born companions who know nothing about year-round sunshine), and about how she waits almost desperately for the hour of sunshine, and how her classmates cruelly locker in a broom closet (or something) and cause her to miss it.

That’s the story that came to mind this weekend as I watched the weather report and saw just how suddenly we were going to plunge back into winter after a lovely hint of spring (between noon today and noon tomorrow the temperature will drop about sixty degrees). I felt like I needed to spend as much time outside as I could, to take advantage of the weather because I wouldn’t have a chance for, well, at least 10 days. So I took a Sunday walk yesterday morning and shed my jacket for short sleeves towards the end of it. And then today as I sat cooped up in my windowless basement office space with Yahoo! Weather pulled up on my laptop and saw that we had reached the high of 64 degrees for the day, I felt the urgency particularly acutely and got up and exited the Education building for a quick turn around central campus just so I could experience the warm weather before temperatures began falling.

We’re down to forty-three now, and still dropping, and the wind is blowing pretty fiercely outside. Weather in Michigan is strange. I guess weather is strange everywhere but the most temperate climates—“If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes” I have been told in Utah, Virginia, and Michigan and I suspect it gets said almost everywhere. But the difference between a mountain desert climate and the Midwest is surprising. For the most part, Provo had become pretty predictable. There were sudden temperature changes and quick storms and false starts to spring, just like there are in Ann Arbor, but these things happen in particular ways, and I’m not yet used to the way they happen here.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed has to do with the time of day in which these things occur. In Provo I could expect that temperatures would drop at sundown and continue to drop through the night, and that the coldest time of day was usually right before the sun came over the mountain (which did not correspond to first light—it took me several years to realize that it was normal for winter temperatures to be colder at eight in the morning than at seven). Then it would warm up during the day and reach a peak somewhere mid-afternoonish. I thought this seemed pretty normal.

Here, although that pattern does occur, it’s not all that unusual for temperatures to hold overnight, and sometimes to even increase. This makes no sense to me meteorologically. On top of that, the temperature is prone to dropping around midday, especially during temperamental seasons like late fall and early spring. I learned this the hard way on a day back in October or so when I decided not to wear my jacket on the way to school one morning because it was almost warm enough for me to go without, and so certainly by the time I walked back in the afternoon it would be blazing. A very cold, wet mile home convinced me not to take weather patterns for granted.

The other thing I notice here (and this is slightly less weather-related, but still relevant) is that I am not nearly as aware of the sky as I was in Provo. I only realized this after my spring break in Utah, when suddenly the sky was just there. I guess I’ll make another literary allusion and mention Douglas Adams’ sky-less planet, where the sky was dark and people just didn’t notice it, didn’t realize there was such a thing as sky in the first place. It’s not that I’m completely unaware of the sky out here—I’ve seen some gorgeous sunrises on early morning runs (when I could run…stupid, stupid knee injury), and I do notice the difference between sunshine and clouds. But for the most part, unless there’s something spectacular to see (like a gorgeous sunrise on an early morning run), the sky just doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s either gray or blue or some shade in between, or maybe blue fading into gray at the edges.

But like I said, I wasn’t aware of the inconspicuousness of the sky until I went back to the mountain west where the sky is as conspicuous as can be. It may be partly that the mountains call attention to it—the mountains frame the sky and make it feel…big, I guess. And it’s probably also because the clouds tend to cluster around the mountains in unusual ways—out here it’s just all the same.

It’s not that I’m complaining about Ann Arbor. On the contrary, I’ve decided I rather like it here. I just find it interesting to notice things that I took for granted and didn’t realize were not natural, normal parts of human experience. Presumably after I spend another three or four years ago the mountains and the sky and the weather in Utah will seem almost as strange to me as the trees and the sky-less-ness and the weather in Michigan seem to me now, and my ability to anticipate Ann Arbor temperature changes will adjust accordingly. Presumably.