Pressure Drop

I say, a pressure drop, oh pressure
Oh yeah, pressure drop, a drop on you
I say, a pressure drop, oh pressure
Oh yeah, pressure drop, a drop on you
I say, and when it drops, oh, you gonna feel it
Pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure
- "Pressure Drop," by Toots and the Maytals

I might be imagining things, but with the passing of our high pressure system and the cold weather that sat on us for most of a month, things feel different. There seems to be more depth to the woods. (My and Cedar’s attention seem drawn more uphill to the rest of the mountain on our walks.) Sound travels differently. Some days before I get up, I listen for ravens to indicate what it’s like out. Their calls are softer but seem to travel farther on these misty, low-pressure days.

Maybe I’m influenced by Tim, who is home for one more day, and is finding great interest in learning about sounds as he makes electronic music, and thrills to the math of it all. (Those thrill-waves seem to stop when they hit, Dad, but that’s okay. And Tim somehow didn’t seem to share my thrill that residents of Juneau actually heard “sonic booms” from the Tongan undersea volcano eruption; talk about pressure drops… It’s crazy to me to think about those sound waves traveling the ocean all the way from Tonga and then finding release in a thunderous boom in the Alaskan air.)

There’s no question that Cedar’s attention was uphill on our walk today. She actually swam her way through the snowpack in the neighbor’s yard to follow some scent up on the forested hillside, then stopped frequently today for a whiff of something way uphill. Maybe smells travel more easily in this lower pressure air, too? Or maybe the trees are thawing, releasing more of their chemistry, or maybe deer are coming down for a little forest bathing themselves.

My speculation is worth little. But I had a fun memory on the walk today of delighting in Ted Hughes’ use of sound in his poem “Football at Slack.” Back when I first discovered this–when I was in Tim’s shoes, trying to figure out a senior thesis–I interpreted “slack” as slack tide, as if all these extra-bouncy things might be happening at that moment of planetary equipose, or maybe that “slack” also could have had connotations for low pressure, “the depth of Atlantic depression…” (Turns out “The Slack” is actually a region of Yorkshire, England, where Hughes grew up. But long live connotations. These sounds are still bouncing around while Hughes is not, right?)

Football at Slack

Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill
Men in bunting colours
Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.

The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men
Spouted like water to head it.
The ball blew away downwind –

The rubbery men bounced after it.
The ball jumped up and out and hung in the wind
Over a gulf of treetops.
Then they all shouted together, and the blown ball blew back.

Winds from fiery holes in heaven
Piled the hills darkening around them
To awe them. The glare light
Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.
Then the rain lowered a steel press.

Hair plastered, they all just trod water
To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up
Coming fine and thin, washed and happy

While the humped world sank foundering
And the valleys blued unthinkable
Under the depth of Atlantic depression –

But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air
And the goalie flew horizontal

And once again a golden holocaust
Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.

-from Remains of Elmet, 1979

And finally–wasn’t I writing about Cedar?– I’ve been marveling at the bounce in her step lately. I tried to catch that lightness of a happy trot, a cadence above a run but below a walking pace, but I missed it again and again. So here she is just plodding along, maybe sensing the pressure drop, maybe not. But likely happy and heedless of my blather.