Weather

You know how sometimes the weather just doesn’t seem right? Those summer day’s where you need to put on a sweatshirt? Or the middle of winter and it’s not just sunny but too hot to be wearing jeans? Well I found out how that happens, I can’t tell you how I found out but I can tell you a little bit about what goes wrong on those days.

See, there’s this room, I don’t know where exactly it is but I got the feeling it was under a mountain or something, underground somewhere anyway. It doesn’t have any windows and there are a lot of long corridors and doors to pass through before you get there. But when you do, you open that last door and walk into this room. It’s a control room, to be honest it looks a lot like the kind of room you’d see in a movie about space shuttles or something. Only the technology seems to be a lot more advanced in this room than it was in the 1960s.

I think you’ve probably already worked out that this room is where they control the weather. I know, you all thought it was a natural phenomenon and couldn’t be controlled, you don’t really believe me at this point. But that’s ok, I’ll tell you anyway, I don’t have any interest in whether you believe me or not.

In this room there are two people working, the weather wardens as they are known. It’s a job with a lot of responsibility but not much training is really needed. The people who maintain the machines and update the software in the control room, they’re the rock stars of this outfit. The wardens fall more into the semi-skilled labor category. Usually, at least that’s what I’m told, one of the wardens will control the cloud and precipitation related systems and the other will control the wind system. The wind warden is usually the more senior of the wardens on shift, it’s a critical system and very hard control on a large scale. I know what you’re thinking “ahh, that explains cyclones and hurricanes and all of that” No, those are done on purpose, I cant go into why but when you see one of those you can be sure that the very best wardens are on duty that day.

Which brings me to the cause of those rogue weather events. Obviously there’s weather all of the time, it’s a twenty-four seven operation as they say. So the wardens are on a shift system, its usually four days on and two days off with the day, night and swing shits changing every two weeks. The thing with being a warden is that it isn’t especially well paid. They do get good money but most of that is hush money, this is the kind of information that can’t get into the public arena for a whole host of reasons. No as far as the pay scale at the weather control centre goes, the wardens are right on the bottom. So the big problem is motivation and absenteeism and this is where those rouge events come in. As I mentioned before, the wind is the most critical part, there’s a lot of power to be controlled. Think of driving a formula one car, now imagine that Michael Schumacher can’t make it in to the office today. Now also imagine that the other race car drivers are lowly paid and don’t want to come into the track today just because Michael is feeling off colour, it’s their day off and they’ve just come off two weeks of night races et cetera et cetera.

So, to stretch the metaphor further than even I thought possible, now you have your head mechanic trying to change the sparkplugs on the Ferrari and steer the thing at the same time. You see, the biggest problem that the world faces from a weather point of view is that of shift work scheduling. As I mentioned before, I don’t care if you believe me or not. I just thought I’d explain it to you and let you make your mind up. Whether you do believe me or not doesn’t matter, but what does matter very much is that you never mention this to anyone. This little secret has to go with you to your grave, it’s a very serious business this weather thing. 

A Story for Kate

It was quiet and she was on her own, this wasn’t unusual for this time of day. Everyone else was out working and she’d turned off the radio. She didn’t like the man in the afternoons, he struck her as a bit of a moron and the other stations well they were worse than the afternoons guy on her station. So the radio was off and no one was around. She was busy kneading bread when it happened. Baking was something she enjoyed rather than something she did out of necessity, it would have been a lot easier to just buy bread but there was something satisfying about making it yourself.

So there was flour over the bench top and her hands were deep in dough when, for whatever reason she looked out of her kitchen window. The house is on the side of a hill with a wide view. At the bottom of that hill is the beach and out as far as the horizon is the sea. It’s a nice kitchen window to glance out of and taking a look at the water and the sky and the blurry line where the two somehow meet, well that was a bit of a habit. A natural routine that she didn’t really notice that she did, she certainly didn’t know why she looked out of the window right at that moment. But she did, just as on countless other days, but this wasn’t any other day.

This was so much of a different sight to all of those other casual thoughtless glances. She left her dough, wiped her hands on her apron most un-thoroughly and rushed down the hill to the beach. The whales were huge, really they were much bigger than she had ever imagined. At this stage there were only about a dozen other people on the beach. There were a couple of men who seemed to have some idea of what to do and were giving directions. One of these men told her to help with the buckets of water, they were trying to keep the whales wet. But they were huge, no one could reach the tops of them, a couple were carrying a ladder over the sand dunes. Feet stuck in the sand she stood watching as they tried to use the ladder to get buckets and wet towels to the top of the giant fish. Mammal. It’s a mammal she corrected herself mumbling a little bit. But no one heard her, she stood there frozen and watching as more and more people arrived but the group remained just as ineffectual. It was like watching a group of ants discovering an entire cake. Even with ladders the people were only halfway up the sides of the whales, they were house sized and the people were still only people sized.

It struck her that these whales were just too big to be saved. It wasn’t like what you see on the TV, there wasn’t going to be any dramatic rescue. None of these giant mammals were going to be turned back towards the water. Her feet picked themselves out of the sand that had seemingly turned to clay around her. The bustle continued all across the beach, there must have been at least ten of them stranded now. She didn’t want to count them, it didn’t matter. They were lost but if they had have died in the sea she would never have seen them, would never have had to know about their demise. She didn’t feel guilty about walking away, it was as clear to her as anything she’d ever understood, those whales were going to die.

The drive back up the hill seemed a lot slower then the descent earlier. She salvaged her dough, it wasn’t going to be her best loaf but it would work out alright. She didn’t look out the window anymore. The habit that had built up over time had disappeared immediately. No regrets about what she’d done but she didn’t want to see. The magic was gone from that seascape. She couldn’t live here anymore; it was time that they moved on anyway. Time to get away from this place.