I used to see clouds chiefly from the ground up. In Seattle, that meant mostly looking at a matte gray ceiling, broken up (prettily enough) by tall firs. On clear days, the unexciting clouds were replaced by very exciting mountains and some pretty incredible views. The Pacific Northwest has been described before as "God's Country."
Once, just into my second decade of life, I had an opportunity to see thunderheads. On a week-long canoe camping trip through the Bowron Lakes, I remember one afternoon distinctly when the slanting sunlight of northern climes illuminated large pillars of clouds building over the mountains. I found it (and the fantastically loud and relentless storm that followed) both impressive and exotic. All too soon, however, I returned to mild Seattle and continued my somewhat uninterested relationship with this particular natural phenomenon.
I subsequently spent all but the summers of the next four years in the midwest, followed by one autumn/winter period in Virginia, and found little to change my perspective. But in Pensacola, however, I developed a new appreciation for clouds. There were early winter mornings when I would drive in bad-temperedly for a 5:30 flight brief, only to be stopped in my tracks by the sight of delicate, lacy wisps floating unimaginably high, softly luminous in the approaching dawn. There were tense flights among dark walls of cloud, where my instructor and I would follow the sunlight as best we could, hoping that the field was clear. In late summertime, the evenings were ever heralded by storms arrayed in line-of-battle formation, steadily marching from west to east across the town. Yet I paid but cursory attention to those wonders, for they had much to compete with. My senses were too often busy with the sugary white sand, the unpredictable spring/autumn surf, or the placid and dolphin-graced bayous to contemplate the sky.
San Diego has very little to offer. The desert haze and southern California smog combine to make a pristine blue sky rare even when there are no clouds, and when the sky is obscured it is by a dense and oppressively gray "Marine Layer" of fog that sits about 2000' above the water. The air is clearer in the mountains and over the small airfields I routinely fly through in El Centro and Creech, but it is desert country. There are no clouds there.
But the skies over the western Pacific are a wonderland. Many sunset hours I have spent on long navigation legs, quietly traversing the hundreds of miles between the mainland and Okinawa and contemplating the multi-colored ranges that tower from a mere twenty thousand feet over the water to over sixty thousand, or the broken layers that look like blasted landscapes below the aircraft. On many approaches into MCAS Iwakuni I have seen thick fog lap against the volcanic slopes of Japan's home islands, secretively obscuring coasts, towns, and valley floors. Many evenings in Australia I stood in the entrance tunnel to our operations bunker, watching vast thunderstorms gather the dying sunlight in the distance or watching their fury lash the unsheltered Outback. Occasionally, I had the fortune to fly (warily) in the vicinity of such storms, marvelling at their sheer bulk, the violence of their lightning, and the astonishing density of the rain they visited on the ground.
All in all, I find that I appreciate weather much more than I used to. In all likelihood this is as much to do with the places I've lived or visited as it is with the fact that weather is an actual threat to those in my profession. Recently I had my first experience of "the leans," a sort of vertigo or disorientation wherein what aircrew feels as "straight and level" flight is in fact frighteningly skewed. In my case, I felt that my airplane was tilted up on a wingtip--90 degree angle-of-bank, for the aviation-minded--and dropping like a rock, despite the attitude indications in the cockpit showing me that we were in fact flying as straight and level as possible. More than a source of disorientation, weather in the form of clouds can so thoroughly obscure the ground that an airplane cannot safely descend low enough to see a runway...which makes landing impossible. Certain weather phenomena can actually damage the airplane, such as hail or the ice which forms sometimes when flying through precipitation (built-up ice will actually change the shape of the wing and in extreme cases cause the airplane to lose aerodynamic lift). So it is not surprising that I focus more on things like clouds, given that they can pose a serious threat.
I suppose in some ways I probably view the skies in some wise as sailors view the sea: something to love, something to respect, and at times something to fear. And then the common-sense warnings of innumerable military safety posters emerge from my memory. After all, knowing to fear the sky makes me a safer aviator.
But even at it's most dangerous the sky is a beautiful place.
