OPINION: Sight of a thunderhead serves as summer preview

May 27—The juvenile thunderhead seemed to rest on the shoulder of Black Mountain, a temporary appendage that at a cursory glance might have been mistaken for stone rather than ephemeral water vapor.

For me, though, the vantage point from Bowen Valley, just south of Baker City, is a familiar one.

I was not fooled by the illusion.

I'm no geologist but I know, from perusing various books and maps, that Black Mountain is not a volcano. This makes the peak, which rises above the southeast corner of Phillips Reservoir, an unlikely candidate to suddenly sprout topographic features.

The sight of that cloud, slate gray in the center with fringes of white around its fluffy top, thrust me suddenly from spring into the summer storm season.

Thunderstorms are perfectly plausible in May, to be sure.

But for me the classic thunderhead is the sort that forms on hot afternoons in July or August, when broiling air becomes buoyant and ascends until it can no longer hold all its latent moisture.

The physical processes that conspire to transform an innocuous cumulus cloud into a malevolent cumulonimbus, with its potential to spawn crop-smashing hail and tree-cracking gusts and lightning bolts that set fire to vulnerable forests, are far beyond my ability to comprehend.

I was fortunate to get through high school chemistry without burning down the laboratory after mishandling a Bunsen burner.

But I needn't grasp the scientific principles to relish the return of this atmospheric concoction, as reliable as the January blizzard that graces every streetlight with a halo, or the October dawn when the frosty air seems so bright and sharp that it ought to ping, like fine crystal, when you snap it with a finger.

The distinctness of the seasons is one of Baker County's most fetching attributes, it seems to me.

I don't mean only that we can expect the snow squall to give way to the lilac blossom, or know that the harsh yellow of the rabbitbrush will yield, come autumn, to the softer shade of the tamarack.

I anticipate with at least as much affinity the less tangible sensations as the seasons wane and wax.

The July thunderstorm and its May counterpart might be closer to siblings than to cousins, in a meteorological sense. But they feel quite different to me.

I rather expect rain, or hail, during May. It is, after all, on average the wettest month hereabouts.

A midsummer storm, by contrast, often marks the only deviation amid a long spell of the hot, dry weather that is the default in our arid climate, sheltered as we are by the twin rain shadows of the Cascades and the Elkhorns.

The sense of anticipation is much more palpable to me when I see clouds amassing in the southwest, and feel the heat intensify as it so often does in those strange still moments before a storm breaks and the willow boughs begin to thrash about.

It is, appropriately enough, an electric feeling, one that can make the fillings in my teeth seem to vibrate, and the fine hairs on my arms to quiver.

I have in recent years sadly supplemented skywatching, a trait I undoubtedly share with my ancestors dating back dozens of millennia, with the ersatz, if effective, digital version. Which is to say that in addition to glancing up at the sky I also look down at my cellphone and its cunning displays of Doppler radar. This is interesting, as technology can be. But the yellow and red digital blobs that denote a storm — which remind me of nothing so much as the rudimentary graphics from an Atari 2600 game — can't convey the acrid smell of ozone from lightning, can't make your organs feel as though they've been jumbled the way a cannonade of thunder, seeming to explode directly overhead, can do.

The sheer power of nature can't be captured in pixels.

And although I recognize the wisdom of seeking shelter when a storm approaches and would never suggest otherwise, I also look forward, among the many experiences that summer promises and usually delivers, to those moments when I stand in my yard, awaiting the coming of the tempest.

No other season can replicate those interludes between the predictable heat of the afternoon and the brief downpour, when the sweat on my neck seems to turn to ice.

No air conditioner can produce a draft of air so refreshing.

And then the steaming aftermath as the sun rapidly regains its strength, leaving only the puddles as evidence that the storm, on its way to dampen places far beyond the horizon, was ever here.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.