Even if I ride the wings of the dawn, and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea…
—PSALM 139:9
A LONG BLUE TUBE SURGES across the Adirondack sky: what looks like a giant shock wave stretching from horizon to horizon, rushing forward while spinning backward, in the process sucking up moist air with furious abandon, while swirling all the dust and leaves below. Could it really be a cloud glory? Long rolling clouds, complete with wind squalls, wind shear, and fast updrafts, glories sometimes launch severe thunderstorms. The visible cloud glories, I mean. Invisible cloud glories haunt the earth’s skies in all seasons, at all altitudes, and some people think they may be the ghostly cause of wind shear. In Ithaca, we certainly have our share of wind shear, and also a gulf-like lake to collect glory. Still, it’s the first cloud glory I’ve ever seen here, a long gut of gusty air riding on a cold front. Passing overhead, the cloud rolls darkness into light, as if painting the dawn. Then the air hangs flat. A glory can stop the wind.
That wouldn’t surprise the Aborigines of northern Australia, who call cloud glories yibibis, and summon them with a stomping dance, because glories herald the wet hunting season, when fish run, new grass grows, and the bush nuts and figs ripen in heavy dew. For them, it’s a gala time of abundance, the opposite of risk, a far cry from the sport of glory-surfing that unfolds above them.
On autumn mornings, when cloud glories smear Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, glider pilots pilgrimage to the outback hamlet of Burketown (population 235) to surf the leading edge of some wave clouds as long as Britain. Burketown is small enough to picture in one thought: a nearly inaccessible settlement that consists of a school, a pub, a service station, and three general stores gracing a bleak Martian landscape of snake-riddled savannas and salt pans. For glider pilots, the glories create dangerous wind squalls, and the gulf isn’t a good place to ditch since it’s infested with crocodiles. But this unusual dawn sport has been drawing gliders and hang gliders alike for over twenty years. As if surfing a rogue ocean wave, pilots perform maneuvers in the powerful spill at the wave front, and let the huge push fling them far inland.
Only about 20 aircraft surf the glory each year, steered by pilots who are thrill-seekers, joyriders, oddity collectors, or cloud enthusiasts—among them a Qantas pilot from Mooloo-laba near Brisbane; a charter member of the Cloud Appreciation Society from England; the owner of the town’s only light aircraft charter service; and a professor of earth sciences from Canberra. They will be there right now, checking their rigging and eagerly watching the skies. Predicting a cloud glory has become a local art akin to dousing, because glories need a sweet spot of humidity and only form at dawn. Pilots know the signs of approaching glory: an unusually heavy dew, with the wooden tabletops in the Savanna Lodge’s café bending at the corners, the pub’s fridge doors frosting over, the beer cooler sweating, and a thin dark line edging the horizon. Ken, a fifty-something microlight pilot from Melbourne, will have driven twelve days through the outback, as he does each year, for a ride that’s unparalleled, the ultimate gliding adventure: “Despite the forces that are at work as this wave is rolling along, the air that you are gliding through is as clear as crystal. When you are on the morning glory, you are surfing a cloud.”
Long before cloud-glory pilots, William Wordsworth wrote in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
Surfing clouds of glory—literally or in an ecstasy of imagining—we return to the freshness of childhood and a rapport with nature that bubbles up so naturally, Wordsworth says, that it’s “a thought too deep for tears.”
Glories arise as part of the continent’s natural breathing, with cool sea air flowing onto the hot land during the day, and warm land air breathing out at night. Colliding breaths build a turbulent mountain of air that, when it collapses, throws a shock wave ahead of the spreading spill. Not a phenomenon limited to our planet—scientists have sighted possible cloud glories in the atmosphere of Mars, and pioneers may one day surf them. Like so much of nature, glories exist though we can’t see them, unless the conditions are just right and we’re open to possibility.
Dawn is also the hour of hot-air balloonists and soloing student pilots, who prefer a frappé of still air; and it’s the time for “dawn patrolling”—what Hawaiian surfers call early-morning wave riding. As surfer Joelle Tafoya enthuses: “It’s an indescribable feeling when you drop down the face, pull into a stand-up barrel, and see the sunrise over Diamond Head.” Less wind at dawn makes it safer, but sharks also feed most at dawn when their prey becomes visible.
In Ithaca, dawn is the hour of a lemming-like plunge of nearly three hundred women into Lake Cayuga for “Women Swimmin’.” This fund-raiser for the local hospice takes place every August, when the lake is at its warmest (high 70s), and begins at dawn when the water is calmer and there’s little boat traffic. Our long, deep glacial lake narrows at its southern tip, the 1.2-mile crossing takes about forty-five minutes, and every swimmer garners sponsors (last year’s swim raised over a hundred thousand dollars). Women join the swim for many reasons, but often as a tribute to a relative or friend who died of breast cancer. Hospicare is much beloved here, where many families have been touched by its end-of-life care. Although a bad knee keeps me from swimming the lake myself, I sponsor a friend and her daughter, in memory of my mother.
The dawn swimmers, standing on the shore, looking back over their lives—what do they see? Striving? Years lost to ambition? Worry bogs? The joy of loving and being loved? A sunlit, baggy adventure full of steep emotions? Like the Kumbh Mela celebrants, they are drawn down to misty water on the threshold of the day for a raucous commingling of life and death. Entering the lake’s stony darkness, they swim the morning into being and emerge onto the far shore for breakfast, exhausted but also exhilarated. Their fatigue reminds me of a wonderful passage in David Whyte’s Midlife and the Great Unknown, in which he tells of a visit from a monk friend, to whom David confides feeling bone-weary, waterlogged, and windless. His friend listens with concern in the dwindling hours of the night, and then says something that still gives me pause: “You know, the antidote to exhaustion is not rest. It’s wholeheartedness.”