Easy Come, Easy Go

I am fascinated by the weather. When I graduated from Southern Illinois University, it was struck by a derecho. For days afterwards, I read about these fascinating storms, which are essentially inland hurricanes with tornado like tendencies. It was wild.

Aberystwyth has odd weather patterns. Like Seattle, it rains here almost constantly. I can't think of a time here, in two weeks, when the ground has dried out. This makes for very confused fauna. Most of the good trees have dropped their leaves and prepared for winter, but some of the more upstart bushes and smaller shrubs are still covered in dense foliage. And the grass is green. What sort of self-respecting grass (what little there is) would still be green? When I lived with my mother this past summer it was my duty to mow the lawn, and I prayed every day for a frost to snap the grass out of it's constant growth cycle. With this past winter, the last time I mowed was in November. These people still have to mow, and there is plenty of rain to ensure that they do.

Then there is the issue of snow. It snowed here like crazy for two days. An icy, angry snow that quickly covered the majority of the surfaces, and stuck. I figured snow was going to be the norm for a few months, like any other self-respecting winterized town in the Northern Hemisphere.

A day later, a warm rain came through and melted all the ice and snow. What is this? I thought, We don't have to risk our lives to get to school? What will we talk about?

The oddest thing about the weather here is how strangely warm it it. Sure, we are close to the ocean, so, like San Francisco, it's going to be warmer here than one might expect. But we are really far north, latitudinally. Aberystwyth is 52 degrees 24.9 minutes North, while Chicago, my frame of reference, is 41 degrees 52.2 minutes north. To put that in perspective, to drive north from Chicago to 52 degrees north, you would have to drive through Wisconsin, past Lake Superior, and deep into the Ontario woodlands to the Fort Hope Indian Reservation 64, and then a little further North. The nearest city on the map is approximately 128 miles south, called Nakina. At the time of writing this blog, Nakina was facing temperatures of roughly 20 degrees Farenheit. But it feels more like 10 F. Weather.com suggests that it will be routinely below zero for the next few nights with snow showers on and off. Chicago, to the south, a little more than 10 latitudinal degrees to the south, is at 35 F but expects to drop into the 20's through the week.

Do you know what the weather was like here today: 50. I could have sworn that I slept through the entire winter when I woke this morning. The breeze had a faintly decaying odor that come with the first rains of spring, thawing the world and decomposing the collected leaves from the fall. The sun was warm on the skin. I walked around town and campus without a jacket. It's supposed to dip a bit into the upper thirties before rebounding by the end of next week back into the upper 40s for the weekend.

This, to me, is totally strange. I am north, much further north than where I used to live, and experience has taught me that the further north one goes, the colder it gets (see: the Arctic Circle, North Pole, et al).

But here is what Aberystwyth did get today: fog. When I woke this morning, it was like someone had taken the entire town of Aberystwyth, pushed it up through the ubiquitous cloud cover, and rested it onto of some Cloud-City-meets-the-Jetsons type apparatus. The tops of the hills to the south were visiable, as were some of the roof tops, but the sea and the city itself lay obscured beneath a dense cover of fog. I watched, as the sun rose, and the fog rolled back.

That was neat. I talked about it with my adviser and another PhD student over tea this afternoon, and everyone agreed: that was neat. Then it came back, like something straight out of a Stephen King story. I watched Batman: The Dark Knight after an eventful and exciting day. While enjoying the movie, I looked through the window and saw the fog literally creeping through the Pentra Jane Morgan (the student village). I looked into town to see it, again, totally covered in a think, white blanket of fog. There must have been some sort of soccer/football match in town, because these flood lights were lit, making it seem as if an alien craft had landed, and soon would seek consul with the best and the brightest. Maybe force us to mate around the clock, creating a super intelligent race, I hoped. Then I remembered that my special skill is reading comic books. I would be one of the first killed. After the art historians, finite mathematicians, and feminist theorist.

Neat. I went back to my movie, finished watching Batman sacrifice himself for the betterment of mankind, and looked back out the window. There was city, in all her glory, and totally unfogged. I sat in amazement. Usually, it takes the sun, or some sudden change in the warmth of the air to dispel fog, but here it seems the fog has a mind of its own. It just went away, leaving the clear, cool air and myriad stars above. I closed the window at that. If the fog has become self-aware, there is no hope for us.