High Pressure
Hello from the craft table, porch, and upstairs desk
March 1, 2024, 8:17 AM
32ºF/ 0ºC, sunny, pressure 1034, waning gibbous
This week I’ve been feeling nostalgic about our schedule at sea.
I miss the sturdiness of the watch schedule — 4 hours on, 4 hours off — and the fluidity of time in port. This extended period away from speedy cell signals and paid commitments put me in touch with my cycles, surrounding weather systems, and seasons. I find it difficult to now turn down the volume on those signals, to show up the same every day when everything is always changing.
I miss being on watch and at the helm of the good ship Azimuth.
At sea, safety was more straightforward, the threats being just over the bow or horizon, or occasionally right inside our skulls.
Yesterday we went to see the premier of Dune: Part 2, the continuation of a story that has met me in my intensity at various points of life, but with a stylistic abstraction that still allowed me to escape into another world. The previews for the movie were quite striking — a modern-day civil war on American soil, another Planet of the Apes with all the violence of us humans, a Twister tornado chaser remake, King Kong and Godzilla toppling cities (again), and Marvel reaching deep into the storylines for another blockbuster. I settled in with my popcorn and wondered at these grim offerings. Where are the stories about creation or repair? What do we get out of making and watching these movies that guide us through the collapse of habit and infrastructure and even higher body counts than we see in the news?
I sense that these blockbuster movies satiate our desire to experience a range of emotions and that this media has steadily increased to fill the void between the safety many of us experience and the atrocities that can be piped into our newsfeeds relentlessly. It’s not our role to turn away from real-life violence. In the limited time we have outside of rest, work, and care commitments, where do these movies fit in?1
Dune and Frank Herbert remind us that fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I’ve been moving around all morning trying to get my thoughts straight and the day underway. I woke up at 4:30 AM, but for some reason, my watch read 9 PM. I consulted my great-grandparents’ clock on our dresser, made a cup of tea, and read a chapter of The Quickening. After puttering around some more, I went to the pool, swam 600 yards, and sat in the hot tub. Another person joined the tub and let out a comically full-bodied yawn that set the tone for the day. The convenience store was mysteriously closed, so I returned home with no eggs and ate leftovers on the porch.
I asked Scott what I should write about today and we got talking about how and why this week’s weather has been so varied. Cypress kept an eye on the squirrels while we wrote this explainer inspired by the current high pressure system:
Low-pressure systems are characterized by rising warm air that leaves a slight vacuum underneath. This movement sucks in the air from all sides. Often this air from different places creates atmospheric chaos, known to us as rain and storms.
High-pressure systems, on the other hand, have cold air from the upper atmosphere dropping rapidly and dispersing air outwardly.
Because the earth is spinning, this displaced air builds into rotating systems. Low-pressure systems move counter-clockwise, and high-pressure systems move clockwise.
The rotation of the earth and our latitude generally dictate that weather systems move from west to east in the US.
When air comes from the south in northern latitudes, it is warm and generally has more moisture. When it comes from the north, it is typically drier and colder.
The beginning of a high-pressure system is cold, and the middle is often cold as well because there is little to no movement. The end of the system is warm and it often rains because the air is coming from the south.
The pressure has already dropped slightly since I started typing up this post. The high pressure system will move offshore over the weekend and a new low will develop over New York on Sunday and temperatures will rise to 65ºF here. How has the weather been for you?
Last weekend, we went to Maryland to stay at a rental cabin in the mountains with friends. We gathered up some sticks that struck our fancy and I wove them into a late winter wreath. I love how perfectly scraggily it ended up, just like this season.
The butterfly exhibit at Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, MI is open today - April 30.
Note - these are incomplete and unpolished thoughts, but as the death toll in Gaza tops 30,000 and other armed conflicts continue around the world, it felt right to share my notes.
I'd love to hear more about your wreath-making.