A panorama of fluffy white clouds spread out before me as I drove north across the wide expanse of the Midlands.
I was transfixed and had to pull to the side of the road, for fear of veering off course. Usually on that road I keep a look-out for wedge-tailed eagles which I always seem to spot out of the corner of my eye in the vicinity of Oatlands but this time I was totally distracted by the clouds drifting across the sky. I couldn’t keep my eyes on the road.
And so on the Midlands highway this day I was suddenly thinking not of raptors riding the thermals but the beauty of clouds themselves. Ahead of me there were what I’d term cartoon clouds, these splashes of ragged white you see as a backdrop to the Peanuts strip.
The sky, of course, belongs to the birds, who use it for not only travel, but hunting, for display and the marking of territorial boundaries with song, as the skylark does from a great height. The sky to humans is generally more functional, merely a way of getting from A to B by plane.
When humans talk of clouds they frame them in the context of the horizon. During the time I worked in Britain I remember an Australian colleague complaining England lacked horizons. Now, slowing down to take in the azure sky dotted with the work of a cartoonist I could see what he was talking about. At that point I vowed never to take an open sky for granted again.
According to Luke Howard’s 1802 classification system, which we still use today, clouds fall into 10 groups. In the highest layer are: cirrus (wispy), cirrocumulus (the mackerel sky) and cirrostratus (fine sheets rather than clumps). There are three cloud types in the mid-level: altocumulus (clumpy), altostratus (heavier sheets) and the raincloud, nimbostratus.
The three lower down are stratocumulus, stratus and cumulus, the latter being the iconic cloud shape beloved of the cartoonists. Last, there’s the one that stuck fear in ancient peoples, and can still strike unease today – cumulonimbus, the storm-bearer, the thundercloud.
Each genera has a number of subspecies, to cover every blob and wisp, but if we go down that route we begin to sound like the weather experts on television.
In the modern age, to these natural phenomena we must now add manmade ones: the contrail made by high-flying jets, the factory flume, and the forestry burn-off. And human-made clouds have their menace at the top of the cloud food chain – the atomic mushroom cloud.
The life expectancy of an average cloud is only about 10 minutes. When I resumed driving, the clouds had changed shape. Shape-shifters in the sky. At one point, a cloud that resembled an elephant had changed as if by magic into a gazelle.