Early summer storms

Tue 7-8-2014

It’s been a wet late spring and early summer in and around Minneapolis. Many of the thunderstorms have been quite violent and the flooding has been severe. In one of the very first storms I set out with my clear utility glasses, lights and waterproof layers and biked through the heavy rain, down the Minnehaha Creek trail.

It was a rare event and a privilege to get soaked by the first warm raindrops of summer. While cranking the pedals of my shitty steel bike I thought about the statistic that for every one woman who dies from a lightning strike, seven men die. This is thought to be due to men having more outdoor occupations and being generally dumber.

On that trail I thought about how people delight in a wide variety of natural phenomena. It’s fun and enchanting to see the sunrise or to be outside when the first snowflakes of winter start to fall, especially when you’re dripping with effort and exertion.

I thought about my most recent National Geographic magazine, whose feature article was on the huge numbers of exoplanets being discovered every year. There may be another world out there where storms burn the continents with acid rain. Or another world where the oceans churn with cold liquid alkanes. Or another world where ultraviolet light blasts apart the molecules of heredity of the inhabitants there, causing them to grow opaque exoskeletons or to live totally under the planet’s crust.

I pictured creatures whose greatest delight is to swim in those cold, volatile oceans, or to run about amid the caustic showers. Perhaps, even, there’s the collective joy of a wise old civilization that had calmly confronted its ultimate peril: thermal death and entropy. Maybe as their star fizzled out, they dispersed into space in a diffuse cloud of electronic signals, coding their memories and cognition into bits conveyed by the flickering charged particles they would become. They would still learn and grow, and remain individuals, but they would never again inhabit bodies, instead continuing to communicate and to reduce their use of energy asymptotically as they delayed oblivion for as long as possible.

“We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Perhaps these beings, in their remote cloud, would delight in suddenly feeling x-rays from a distant pulsar. Perhaps they would witness the birth of distant stars as grandparents do here on earth, with the most exquisite, genuine, vicarious joy, picturing the spring showers and cool dips those future beings are in for.

But back to my bike ride: I made it home safely, dumb as ever, and grateful to be acquainted with springtime.

Included: photos from a trip to the old Cedar Avenue bridge in Bloomington, Minnesota.