Good morning, Hikers!

As I write to you this morning, the rains are back and are thumping mightily against Agnes’s rain fly. I’ve Gene Krupa drumming on one side of the tent and Buddy Rich on the other and each are playing the drum solo of their lives. Very shagadelic, man.  .

I’m the lucky beneficiary of what has proved to be extraordinary weather forecasting talent.  Jack Parrish is a meteorologist for the NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency.  Fraser Hale, a good friend, fellow backpacker and photographer (except that Fraser is a REAL photographer, you know, film and f-stops and all of that cool photo-speak) put Jack and I together early on in this trek. Jack has called the weather and the time I’d see it with an almost spooky accuracy.

Jack isn’t just a meteorologist, he’s a weather shaman.  We’ve never met and I have never seen his workplace.  This opens a pretty big door for my imagination, especially as as I “hunker.” Hunker is the weather word Jack uses when he advises me to find shelter inside of Agnes until things ease up a bit).

I picture him there in an eerie, blue lighted government weather center, computers spitting out atmospheric models with little arrows and circles and 8x10 color glossies.  He is, of course, wearing sensible shoes and a lab coat, the pocket of which is bristling with pens, pencils and an old key, which he likes to attach to a kite with string and fly on days with exciting lightning activity.. 

The surface of his desk is flawlessly organized.  There is a drawer on one side of his desk, one that looks sturdier than the others.  He dials in the combination and removes its carefully stored contents.  It is a jar of made of clay and its surface is covered in ancient symbols depicting nature’s primary elements. It is clearly an antiquity of great rarity and age.

He reaches over to a Volvo-sized printer and takes from its try the latest weather printout. It is poster-sized and in full color.  He spreads it out on his desk, anchoring its corners with massive ceramic coffee cups bearing that cool NOAA logo. He rubs his chin thoughtfully as he eyes the satellite images of swirling clouds and those tiny arrows that point out the intentions of invisible winds aloft.

Suddenly, his eyes betray a trance-like state. He reaches for the jar and closes his eyes.  Cupping the opening of the jar in one hand and its smooth clay bottom in the other, he begins to shake up the contents. He does so while reciting an incantation in a tongue long dead and know to no one but him.  The shakes fall into the rhythm of the incantation, and soon his voice and the sound of the jar’s mixing contents become the only sound in the room.  His co-workers gather to watch this scene in rapt fascination, the ghostly blue light illuminating their faces. They know this ritual all too well; it is the same one he employs to unerringly roll the coveted five sixes when they gather on unchallenging weather days to play Yahtzee. 

His concentration is unbreakable, even as a voice in the background announces that the Krispy Kremes have arrived. Suddenly, he snaps out of the trance, opens his eyes and and with a final, pent-up exclamation he spills the contents of the jar across the chart on his desk.  The tea leaves and chicken bones spread themselves randomly across the multi-million dollar map bearing swirling cloud masses, high-pressure zones and steering currents

Randomly, that is, to you and me.  But not to Jack Parrish. 

Imagination… it’s all you have when you’re hunkered in the rain on the Florida Trail.

Barometric Cheers from St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge, Mike