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By Root 385 0

looked lumpy Some kind of a front was coming in from the west, nothing very much, just enough to raise up a sea to our south, and this was the first sign of it. The breezes the front was pushing, which would bring us some rain, were part of a massive rolling wave of slowly tumbling air that stretched from Labrador well down into Pennsylvania, bringing damp but otherwise benign air all down the eastern seaboard. The jet stream was that week making a lazy loop almost down to the Gulf, and this loop was helping to steer the whole system. Behind the front—you could see it on the synoptic weather maps—was a massive plateau of still air all the way past the Great Lakes and almost to the prairies and south to the High Plains. West of that . . . It was snowing on the Sierras; another front was pushing the damp air out of the deep Pacific eastward, and it was dropping its load on Mammoth, where I have a good friend who even then would be digging out his SUV to get to the skiing trails—snow is a mixed blessing in Mammoth, but the good always outweighs the bad, except in a drought. He'd have another two feet of snow to deal with today, perhaps more. My front was connected to his, with only two lazy whorls of separation. Two whorls and more than three thousand miles. How many for that Pineapple Express that dumped snow on New England after starting somewhere down around Hawaii, and detouring past the Aleutians? Not more than four. Maybe only three.

Earlier, I had spoken to my mother, WLLO was at a little beach community called Pringle Bay, an hour or so from Cape Town— she had gone to ground there with the rest of the family for Christmas, partly to escape the heat in a period of grim water shortages, and partly because, well, that's where the family went for Christmas, sons and daughters and cousins and a dozen children with assorted dogs, tumbled together in a kind of friendly chaos. The weather at Pringle Bay was hot and sunny—it was 36° Celsius, and they were having dinner outdoors. Their winds were southeast onshore breezes, not much stronger than ours, ten thousand miles away on the other side of the earth. I looked up the synoptic map for the southern hemisphere, courtesy of the Australian weather bureau's Web site, and saw a pattern not very different from the one we were experiencing. There were no typhoons in the Pacific, but there were several frowning waves of disturbed air, and the Furious Forties were as furious as ever, the winds scudding eastward in the midlatitudes between the Cape of Good Hope and Antarctica. Gales blew up whitewater just a few hundred miles south of Pringle, but the family had gone to the beach anyway, blissfully oblivious; the wind wasn't even strong enough for the beach sand to sting, as it often did.

How many degrees of separation between me and Cape Town? More than between me and California, perhaps, but surprisingly few, all in all. A picture came into my mind of the world as a big room, drafty, with maybe a window open (the poles) blowing cold air into the center, setting off corner-to-corner eddies and dips and whirls and swirls, with vortexes in the corners and in places where the cold and warm air collided. Were the air a thinly colored mist, you'd be able to see how it was moving about the whole room, and you'd be able to picture how completely the patterns would change if the window were closed and a door opened, say, or a fire was lit in the fireplace . . . But in the end the very homeliness of the metaphor didn't really work for me, because this was such a very big room with such very big drafts, and the equalizing dance of the winds was so intricate that it demanded a grander metaphor, a "Dance of the Seven Thousand Veils," if you will, the complex pa-vane of the global balancing system, and at that moment I felt that my small breeze, the one that was ruffling the feathers of the mergansers and eiders, was connected to the planetary whole in a way I hadn't really felt before.

This was not as comfortable a feeling as you might expect, because there is a practical downside as well as