25 August 2005
en route: Kansas City to Los Angeles
Another flight, half-way across the continent, a little bumpiness as we rose through the morning rains across eastern Kansas and, now, smoother air as we glide through clear skies across the Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rockies.
Just a few days ago we drove back to Kansas City after a week’s holiday in Santa Fe. Over two days we climbed up past Taos on US 64, across the alpine valley at the foot of Angel Fire and down through Cimarron to Raton. We turned north, following the railway pass between Trinidad and Raton. In the former we gassed up and I chatted with a couple of older ladies at the Welcome Center. I had heard Trinidad’s winter weather described as bitterly cold but was informed that was wrong – there were days when the temperature did hit zero (Fahrenheit) but it wasn’t that cold, not like, say, Leadville where one of them had grown up. Summers had been tough in recent years; there were several days when the mercury passed 100. Leadville, on the other hand, was terrific in summer; only rarely was it as hot as 80.
We slept at Colorado Springs where the air was as clear as I can ever recall. The evening was bright and bracing and my blood ran faster. The next morning we rose feeling strong and hungry.
Why does weather so fascinate me? It’s been something that I’ve followed as avidly as some people do a sports team. On my home page I first look at the weather for key locations: Kansas City, Santa Fe, Worcester (England) and more exotic locales (Antantarivo, General Santos, Istanbul, Dacca). My real search has always been for places away from heat. I grew up in Sonora where the summers were dreadful and not much better when we moved to Arizona. I know, it’s a dry heat but at 110 degrees, it doesn’t much matter, it’s simply hot!
Later I suffered through humid, dreadful summers in Florida and sweated it out on the North Carolina coast. I was a Fulbright scholar in India and bore up under scorching hot seasons and worse monsoons (when the rain passed, the heat was some of the most oppressive I’ve ever experienced).
I recall, as a Boy Scout, the incredible feeling of cool air on summer camp outs in the Arizona Mountains. I remember traveling up into the Chiracahua Mountains one Easter, leaving the warmth of the Sulphur Springs Valley below to climb up into the meadows of Barfoot Park at about 8000 feet where paper thin ice lay over the slow trickle of water from an alpine spring, even covering the furry leaves of the rabbit tobacco and the smoother ones of the bitter skunk cabbage. We were alone up there that morning – I cooked eggs and bacon on a limp gas fire, the eggs ran and the bacon was, I’m being kind, ‘rare’. I can still feel the cold, crisp air of that morning.
So, I check the weather of places where there is relief from heat; mostly they are high, perched over the baking lowlands: Taif in the western mountains of Saudi Arabia, Navada Cerrada above Madrid in mid-summer, the central highlands of Madagascar, Mount Lemmon above Tucson and anywhere in the Italian or Swiss Alps while Milan bakes from mid July to late August.
Even where the escape is not by climbing but towards the sea, I am fascinated. The Freemantle Doctor mesmerized me, the wind reversing each afternoon, dropping its heat over the waves of the Indian Ocean and making Perth afternoons bearable, and there is a drop of as much as 30 degrees or more on many summer days between the Valley and thin coast littoral at Redondo Beach.
Weather is another way to travel. I escaped the Gangetic Plain some 30 years ago by climbing up to Rani Khet, rimmed by the Himalayas. We stayed at the Westview Hotel where the Manager typed up the menu each morning (we were the only guests) and where we sipped at our bed tea while we waited for the wood fired boiler to heat the water for our morning baths. Another summer I tasted forbidden love at a cabin on a golf course just outside Simla. I reveled in the slight cooling that January brings to Manila and Bangladesh. Another time, again in the Philippines, Baguio provided surcease from the broiling lowlands: damp, heavy air and the deeper green of the rain-belt mountains. We drove through the shuttered remnants of Camp John Hay, weird relics of the American presence where the sailors and airmen of Subic and Clark (and their dependents) would recreate a semblance of an Appalachian or Rocky Mountain holiday.
My love and I stayed on the slopes of Ali Shan in central Taiwan and there we watched the ‘qi’ rise from below where it hid the lower world. We rose at dawn and went with other tourists to the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise. The next day we crossed a high pass (Hohuan Shan), bought peaches at a roadside stand in one high valley and slept above Taichung at Kukuan next to a cold stream in a hotel where the hot water was piped directly from the volcanic spring. As strong as these mystical memories is that of me showing off and losing my glasses in the river when I tried to fling an apple core across the water and, later, on the bus into town when she bought dried squid and had to jump off at the first stop to visit the nearest facility, a whiffy spot that I think I can still smell. That night, glasses restored, we rode back up, fetched the car and drove back to Taichung where we amused ourselves at a hotel where our room featured a round bed and a mirror on the ceiling.
