It is just after 5 o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and it is dark; darker than just a few minutes ago. Rain splatters against the windshield and the temperature is just barely above freezing as I continue my climb. The situation is far from perilous, because the air is merely dull, rather than stormy. It is oppressive and gray, just like the two days that had preceded this morning.
Monday night was what I often call a "comic- book night", where the entire flight is in clouds. With little to do, and nothing to see, you could theoretically spend most of the flight reading comic books. You have to remember to change course at the specified points, and you have to keep an ear open for a radio call from the ground. Most importantly, so that you don't spill your coffee on the comics, you have to check that the weather ahead remains as dull as forecast.
Tuesday evening's flight down to the city was forecast to be in fairly good weather behind a cold front. Storms moved through our area in the early afternoon, and were supposed to keep moving eastward, but the weather along the coast never improved. Rain showers seemed to spin around a center in the lower Hudson Valley, changing position, but never leaving.
I had to wait in Elmira almost two hours before I could be fit into the traffic flow to the city, and I spent another half hour in a holding pattern enroute. The weather at arrival provided ample ceiling and visibility, but it was windy and rainy. Sheets of cold rain soaked me before I could secure the airplane and get inside. The trip was long and challenging, but not really difficult.
The forecast had called for the weather to clear before morning, but just like the night before, it was all wrong. Just after takeoff, the world below had disappeared into gray cloud and I was now sitting quietly in my noisy little box, a mile high but still in dark clouds. I knew that someplace up there, the sun was above the horizon, but such a sight seemed out of reach.
Abruptly, the grayness brightened, and shortly I popped out of the clouds and into a world of colors. I had flown through both the top and the side edges of the weather that was hanging near the coast, and in a blinding instant the oppressive goose-stepping grayness was banished. The shards of the departing storm viewed from the outside seemed to be a catalog of nature's colors and cloudscapes.
Weather is always most impressive as it is making a change. The mixes of good and bad provide the greatest variety of cloud forms and colors, and the things we see are reinforced by our emotions. For all our civility, we still carry within us an animal's sensitivity to the weather.
From my new vantage point, I could plainly see that I was at the very back edge of the weather. To the west, the sky was an interrupted blue, and overhead there were fragments of cloud at several altitudes. Looking more towards the northeast, and the center of the storm, the sky was dark all the way from top to bottom.
I spent the next hour coursing above and among the clouds as their grip on the sky was gradually loosened. For a while, colors in one scan of the sky ranged from blue to white through yellow, orange, red, and purple to light gray that darkened almost to black. For a while I cruised barely on top of a broken layer of clouds that afforded me a view of another broken layer below me. The clouds just below my wheels rolled gently with smooth crests, while the lower clouds seemed to be shredded and bothered. Further below laid glimpses of the earth itself with green fields and woodlands splashed in a mosaic of sun and shadow.
After a while it seemed that every patch of cloud was another world, or another galaxie floating in space. For a while, shafts of sunlight shone through hazy air, casting bright spots among shadowed cloud below. Fortunately the flight was nearly over when I fantasized that those spots were the cities of the happy cloud- people...
Maybe all pilots don't think this way, and I am a strange exception. Maybe most pilots have built enough of a callus on their imaginations that they are no longer fascinated by the continual change of the sky. I fly the same route five times a week, but on each flight I enjoy the scenery of a different road. The endless parade of the weather is sometimes delightful, sometimes frustrating, but always a wonder to behold.