RRRIP
“The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls, and like a thunderbolt he calls.”
This is not about flying per se; it’s about what the air can do on a mountaintop, which is pretty much the same thing. There’s a dynamic natural phenomenon you’ve almost certainly never heard of, that I know is real because I’ve experienced it directly more than once. Surely others have witnessed it too, somewhere, so I claim no discovery, but decades of (admittedly casual) research have revealed zero mention of any such thing, in publication or conversation. Further proof that being unheard of never makes a thing impossible.
Prior to starting this piece I looked up ‘thunder’ to be sure of my terms, and of course learned more than everything I knew beforehand. As children we were taught that thunder is the sound of normal air clapping together after a lightning bolt creates a vacuum. Made plenty of sense at the time. But according to Wikipedia, the current theory on ordinary thunder is a shock wave caused by extremely rapid expansion of superheated air. Makes even more sense. Now lower your eyes, for here’s where we reapply that earlier theory to account for this other, unheard of kind of thunder.
I lived for years in a ski lodge tucked below the peak of Vermont’s highest mountain. Between the lodge and the summit looms a pair of near vertical cliffs, really just two facets of one cliff dissected by sharp crease straight down the middle. One November evening I was standing out front of the empty lodge on the flat below those cliffs and heard a sudden boom that sounded like a shotgun — from up there! While I hastened toward cover, scanning the skyline, there came another explosive detonation, different and not as loud… then nothing more.
Dissimilar reports seconds apart implies two gunners! If that’s what it was, had they seen me? If they were crazy enough to shoot at me, a shotgun from that distance was probably nothing to fear, but what about a well aimed ’22? Or was it something else?
And if so, what? A crashed airplane? (Somehow that didn’t occur to me until later, while trying to get to sleep.) Should I climb up there and snoop around — or not?
Dense bouldery woods obstruct the base of those cliffs, and dusk was nigh. Supposing I’d never know what or who it was, I retreated inside and locked the door to my quarters, which I rarely did. Kept the lights off, stashed a ski pole by the bed and a big scary butcher knife under the pillow, and worried myself to sleep.
Then got busy the next morning and forgot all about it… until some other year when a different kind of roar came from the same cliffs.
This time, instead of a shotgun blast it sounded more like coarse sailcloth torn with great force, RRRIP, loud enough to leave an echo. And where previously a different report followed, the same RRRIP was repeated again and again, sporadically. I studied the skyline as before, and watched for any kind of movement in trees below the cliff. Nothing. Then another RRRIP from right where I was looking!
Having simply no choice, and ample time before sunset, I scrambled up to have a look. As usual, from near calm fifty feet below the top, wind across the crest was twenty plus and gusting with that feral punch common only to mountaintops. I stepped, tentatively with this wind at my back, to the edge of those cliffs, then went down and crawled on my belly until arms were hanging over the precipice, right between those facets.
Wind was pouring straight over the cliff, hard favoring this face one minute, then jibing to the other, and then back. The first RRRIP tore my hat off, never to be seen again. Not just hundreds of yards closer to the roar, here my head was inside it. At gut level it was terrifying, but I was too enthralled to turn away. Even so, with every next RRRIP I grew more anxious to bolt, and then came the coup de gras.
An especially intense RRRIP formed a cloud of condensed vapor like you see at the wingtips of fighter jets, lasting only a second or so, but long enough to sere the image in my mind forever. The cloud shot out perpendicular, between the facets, twenty feet or so in the elongated cone shape of a medieval jousting lance, directly below my goggling eyes. Visual evidence of a powerful vortex probably there all along.
And that was enough for me, thanks! Good time to get my scrawny tuchas off them battered rocks before Aeolus reached again for the shotgun…
“…our soul had felt him like the thunder’s roll.”