Originally published in This Land, Vol. 5, Issue 21, November 1, 2014.
Some things you can’t figure out. Not even with a whole heap of scratch paper and a ribbon of data from a chattering Teletype machine. Not before time runs out. And time is like progress—she’s not stopping for anybody.
The answer is out there, though, in the weather.
Foul weather breeds foul deeds. Something my mother used to say. She said it even when I was a kid, before I ever went into the forecasting business. Before I had a career as a young man and then the new computers showed up and the whole science of meteorology went and left me behind. Before I became just an old man with his pencils and maps.
Back then, I thought my mother was foolish. Thought she was just making it up off the top of her head when she used sayings like that. But now I know better. Those sayings come from somewhere. An old, forgotten place where time has worn the words down hard and shiny as coins. When I think back on it, I figure my ma had a lot more wisdom than I ever gave her credit for.
Mothers are like that.
It was a long, long time before I could sit down here at my kitchen table and gather the tools of my old trade. Spread out an obsolete weather map and flatten it down without my hands shaking. Weight the corners. Sharpen my pencils. Try not to scream until my maps are clean and smooth, my raw weather data is bound and ready, and my theory on what went impossibly wrong can finally be laid out in crisp, clean pencil lines.