Reports From Unknown Places

Reports From Unknown Places About Indescribable Events

Digital art & texts by Ninn Salaün - @bleu_capsicum

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[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: oddly, we do not hear the sound of rain from where we are. Looking at the advancing curtain of water, we think we should not be able to hear anything else. It seems this is not for us. On the radar, we find ourselves just outside of the radius of precipitation.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: this is a virga under the altocumulus, made of sublimating ice crystals. This is precipitation which, unlike the rain we have been seeing lately, will not reach the ground. We think this will not exempt us from the rain - we see darker clouds moving our way.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report about the wind blowing across this week: some days, a breeze, and the rest of the time, a gale. The wind is chasing a cold front, west-southwest veering southwest at night, counterclockwise, ten knots in the morning and seven more in the afternoon. Always going.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: it stops raining at some point in the night, and we do not know exactly when, as we were sleeping then. By the time we wake up, fog has taken over. Our expert is somewhere by those trees, but the fog bank is thick enough that we cannot even guess where exactly.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: it is drizzling intermittently, as though we are walking into clouds, and besides that, it is a very bright day. When we look into the distance, we see each field light up one after the other. We hear the rain, the wind, and the birds, and we feel we are here and now.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report during a sunny spell, but while the formation of some clouds is in the process of putting the spell to an end. Only cirrus intortus at the moment, but we know better than to expect them to stop here. While they expand outwards, their shapes surprisingly remain intact.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: after the heat wave, the storms and the torrential rains of May, the month ends quietly. We observed the light breeze, and the formations of cirrus, cirrocumulus, and altocumulus throughout the day. Now at the cusp of nightfall, we feel enough of a chill for a jacket.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: the trends our expert had noted from previous days are being confirmed, and the morning wind is a little chilly. As for coming days, there seems to be flurry of different fronts coming our way - warm, cold, occluded, back to warm. We shall deal with them in due time.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report a couple of hours into a thunderstorm: this is an interesting conjunction of events. In the east, it is the moon rising, not the sun, and it is mid-afternoon, despite the sunset light. We think that the spectacular volume of rain is scattering the light this way.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: after hours of watching clouds rise very high, and then promptly dissolve upon reaching a certain threshold, we found one promising specimen. This is a slow bloom, with a solid stem. The sky is beginning to darken around it. We can almost feel the rain already.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: a little bit of the sun remains in the clouds as night falls. Something in the air has shifted in the afternoon, and the wind is not as warm anymore. Our expert has been tracking the advance of a cold front over the ocean; perhaps it is heading our way.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: we now get around to a month of short nights, a handful of hours between the two ends of nautical twilight. We wonder whether this is enough time for the thermometer to go down. It still smells like sunshine on our skin, even as the sun is getting further away from us.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: this is a side of May we did not know, heat pushing down on us this way. The sight of incoming clouds makes us feel thankful, and the breeze that pushed them in our direction as well. However, in the end, the breeze itself is not any cooler, and we are still sweating.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: we walk into masses of warm air as the sun is getting up to its zenith. At times, when we leave the shade of the trees, it hits us out of the blue, something eerie in the sudden change. We smell the undergrowth’s cold humidity with one leg already in the burning sun.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: while it has been getting warmer and warmer in the last couple of days, the mornings are still full of dew. In a few minutes of walking in the grass, our trousers are damp up to our knees. Our expert is trying not to laugh at us, with their dry feet in wellies.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report about nightfall on the coast, the last few minutes of it. Today was much warmer than yesterday, and the humid air made it feel muggy very fast. A breeze started blowing from the sea late afternoon, and now that it is dark, it is blowing from the land instead.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: before this kind of rain, we witness the hAlf-hour long ritual taking place in the sky. The larger clouds start gathering, and we see rain blurring out the farthest reaches of the horizon. Then, minutes before the flood, those dark, torn up pieces of clouds spread out.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: it is late in the evening, and the sky is bright; the blue there seems as though it could never change. And as we watch the cirrus expand along the jet stream, the swifts ever-present around us, we know the colour fades some, darkens somehow, but we cannot really tell.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report: later on, when we think back to this moment, we remember how cold and windy it was. The colder it got, the brighter the sunset was. We were standing in the half-empty car park, and the scale of the sky above us made us feel so small, crushed under the light.

[Reports From Unknown Places @clever_reports]

We report about the sea of fog in the valley this morning. Tendrils of mist are curling against the flanks of the mountains, slow enough in their movements that we really do mistake it for the ocean at a glance. We do not expect it to last long past mid-morning.