The great grey wall of wonder

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/08/2023 (798 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When we moved to the Prairies, I was overtaken by the sky.

That was in Saskatchewan two years ago: the sheer big broad openness of it, the way the horizons are a full arm-spread apart, the high-arching complete all of it.

I came to the Prairies from Newfoundland, where the sky gets abbreviated by the height of land that hems it in, and also by the regular presence of RDF — rain, drizzle and fog, the three parts of which can happen individually or even all at the same time.

As I wrote in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix at the time, I was especially unused to Prairie rain: in Newfoundland, “huge thunderstorm rain-ships of clouds don’t scud their way across open sky, isolated and surrounded by blue, the clouds’ edges lit bright by the sun.”

So taken was I with those rain-ships that I once spent an afternoon chasing a scattering of individual towering thunderheads around Saskatchewan grid roads. I finally caught one near Bradwell, Sask., where the rain pounded down so hard around me that when the huge raindrops hit the dirt road, their remnants fired themselves a few inches back up like recoil. I watch as the temperature outside the car plunged by nine degrees. I was now parked, the road surface in front of me underwater and as slick as grease.

But I’ve already found that, for storms, Manitoba is something else again.

I love when the world takes the time to make you feel particularly small: a good humbling is a necessary reset we all have to experience regularly, if for no other reason than to buff off the starchy buildup of self-importance.

And what better to do that than the inexorable march of the grey wall?

The grey wall.

Low to the horizon and yet pillaring up into the sky, built out of water and wind and the sheer power (the power of sheer?) where cold air collides with wet warm air. Big storm fronts, shifting slowly towards you.

Twice in just over a month, I’ve had tornado alerts on my cellphone: once in Neepawa, and once in St. Andrews, just north of Winnipeg.

In Neepawa, I’d been outside the car taking pictures of a downpour of approaching rain, the storm’s edges shaped and defined by internal forces that clearly brooked no deviation. No sooner back in the car, then my phone was making that singular set of alert tones: “Take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches.”

In St. Andrews, even though the tornado alert had sounded again, I couldn’t pull myself away from watching the grey-green mass of cloud turning over and into itself, working like jaws.

Then this week, Tuesday morning, I came out of the house to sunshine, with a dark grey thumbnail of cloud inching in from the northwest.

Just a hem of grey-black sky: nothing to be concerned about.

But by the time I was on the bus, half the sky was covered with cloud, and a look at the weather radar on my phone made me doubt I’d get to work without getting wet. The storm at the edge of the morning cold front was a kaleidoscope of heavy rain colours in the radar picture.

Getting close to the building, a huge shelf of cloud, coloured old-bruise, was close. Lightning was working its edges. It arrived, the sky so dark the streetlights all relit, rain in flooding sheets.

I think I understand how people might die in tornadoes. As storms develop, they are too amazingly huge to pull your eyes away from. The grey cloud piling in on itself, tearing at the edges, turning at first so slowly, so gently you almost believe it is in your imagination. Lightning, heavy rain, the sharp sting of hail.

But I know from Atlantic hurricanes there is a moment when exhilarating turns to terror: when you realize that 100 km/h-plus winds are making the glass in your kitchen windows pulse in and out as if they were breathing. When that same wind suddenly tears leaves on the trees into tiny shreds and turns them to paste.

And, I suppose, when and if you hear the freight-train sound of a tornado.

There are things that change awe to terror in an instant.

And yet, I find myself watching storms here with all the excitement and anticipation of a child.

Seven major thunderstorms, two tornado warnings, downpours like I have never seen — and then, in mere moments, a shift back to sun, as if the storms had never been.

Big sky, big storms, big drama.

I love it.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca