Mad Cumulus Agenda

The demise of a famous weather sensitive.

Down by the wild cape of the south they tell a blustering tale of weatherman Tornado Lane. An amateur with refractive passions, he flipped his buttons in his later years, and when his wife Heather left him for a lifeguard, he lost his blithe arrangements and couldn't tell his ozone from a burst of drizzle. This was after a meritorious career. Every dawn for forty years he siphoned off the isobars and checked out the viscosity of the troposphere. "I were a self-appointed hydrograph," he loved to quote, "and did my duty like a guardian of rain drops!"

He was the first man to see the low-front roaring in where Sealer's Cove turns to rocky knolls and the fisherman spot mackerel. He developed a new barometer, tuned to the Appleton layer, and predicted Cyclone Sally Sue-Anne by throwing knuckle-bones in the air. One year he correctly forecast a hot day in December and postulated lunar effervescence until the autumn rains. In the heyday, he once featured on the cover of Climatologists Galore, bathed in allatropic handsomeness, and was renowned among the coastal towns as the man who installed air-conditioning at the race-track. Quiet, unassuming, pacific as an ocean, a worn-faced Welshman with a professional set of gum-boots, he could be seen sniffing out the gurgles of the salty foam, drawing on his powers as a world-class weather sensitive. If that failed, he consulted ant-hills or looked it up in the newspaper.

Meterologists were his passion. He'd met a couple of them and was awed by their aneroidic prepossession, their lightning observations and the wavey lines of their maps. He met Whirlwind Bob Spitz - the famous American - and even shared his binoculars. In 1948 he attended a conference on how sticky humidity is in Brisbane, representing his State. On a chilly night in1961, three degrees below the monthly average, he won the Golden Rain Guage for his tireless millilitres, year in, year out. A man of science, he made a contribution and defined his life with sunny prognostications.

Poignant then is how he fudged his willy-nillies and lost his wits in a sworl of black, throbbing cumulus, a mere breeze of his former namesake. "Morning! How's the weather?" you'd say, and he'd say, "A curse of stormy banging on all sub Jove!" You'd say, "Nice day," and he'd say, "Awaft! Awaft! The inclement day is coming!" Mostly he'd say, "Build ye ventilation shafts, me boys, for a storm-cloud lives in the sea!"

Some nights, as the wind howled through the tea-tree and the dune reclamation signs whistled like a low-pressure trough, he could be heard on the sandy tracks calling to his brother Bluey - lost in a three inch downpour that swept away Miller's Bridge -  and whenever sheets of sky-light struck, peeling and shaking the shoreline, old Tornado, deranged in his yellow mac, climbed onto his roof and shook his fistings at Elijah.

"Harmless," was the local concensus, "but a tragic waste of a good weather forecaster."

Then, one day - about thirty-two celsius with a nice blue breeze, eight or nine knotts, followed by a mild day and a brief change late Saturday -  they noticed that his guage was full but he was nowhere to be seen. His neighbour Crayfish Ray found his prognostications all astray. They searched the sand-hills. They hired a hovercraft. They rang Heather: she was still in bed. They searched his misty haunts and tried to smell him in the wind. For three long days he was gone. The man at the State Emergency Service - mumbling about budgetary restraints - said if he's not back by Monday afternoon they'd send out a runabout and a team with eagle eyes.

"Have you seen ol' Tornado?" people wondered.

"Not since the gusty south-south-westers," people replied.

Then, high-tide on Sunday evening, risen from the dead, defying Davey Jones, he suddenly stood upon a sand-bar, wet and crusty, his beard grey in the sunset, eyes like Al Nino undercurrents, lightning rod in hand. He looked like a smelly oracle bleached with salt and raging against the looming nightfall.

"There he is!" they said, and the entire town rushed down to the beach to see.

He was flailing in the updraughts, calculating the tug of the moon. He looked like Uncle Neptune's worrisome dream, shaking his fists at the pelicans, denouncing the land crabs,  raising his eyes to the swirling sky, sodium-soaked and demented in the froth.

"For forty years," he cried, "I have watched the heady squalls. For forty years I have judged the steamy wonders of the long horizon. For forty years I have ruled over fisher-fleets and bar-b-ques and beach parties and all manner of outdoor activities. Those with ears, let them hear! I tell you, there, there in the sea-bowels" - he pointed - "live the storms of bleak tomorrow!"

"Rubbish!" they said, "The forecast is clear until next Thursday."

Then in their folly the skeptics trembled. Aghast, they watched, and the sand-hills shook, and the waters, folding over and causing great bubbles of fog, burped, spluttered, foamed with oxygen, curled over like a huge aquatic claw and dragged the hatted weatherman down with a single curve into the dreary depths. He was there, standing on the rocks, then he was gone. Just like Gregory Peck in Moby Dick, but without the whale. A big splinter of static cracked from the sky and followed him. Sea-gulls cried and flew away in reckless, panicked circles. Clouds jelled on the spot and then were wispy. It happened in a moment. Without warning, a new generation of weathermen looked on helpless as the needles dropped, turbulent curds of hydrogen swelled up out of nowhere, and an unexpected king tide, ferocious in its undertow, carried off the abalone boats and the jetty at the mouth to Parson's Inlet, leaving all in ruin. Messy clogs of seaweed hung from the rafters.  Fish wriggled on the roadside. Briney agitations swept along the whole unprotected coast.

They never reckoned on Mother Nature's grimace. They never found his body. In his journals they found the ravings of a low depression coming in over the Bight. In his garden they found a wind-chime and a neat patch of tomatos tended by a gentle hand of vegetative insight, and the rain-guage, full to the brim. In his shed they found a legacy of rabbits' feet and charms to still a roving wind, amulets and spells, talismans inscribed with isobars and theurgic appeals for a clear blue day. And in his big black box they found the cumulus agenda. After much deliberation they hoisted it upon the deck of the SS Kitty Maree which ceremoniously carried it far beyond the sudden ledge of Devil's Reef and left it for the hammerheads and squid to figure out.

The tale is still told of those men who lost their all and failed to batten down the patches of their lives and who took a look inside the ocean's menacing reserve. Half the town's fleet was swept off towards white Antarctica never to return. Some men never went fishing again. The sewage overflow was damaged and turned the oysters green. It is said that, near the bridge, or on the angles of the Cape, or by the lighthouse, or in among the sand-bars where the pounding surf holds all the keys, the misty eyes of Tornado Lane still linger. Go down to the Pearly Seabit Inn, order an ale and sample their crumbed whiting and lime side-salad, and ask the locals where all will shake their heads and say, "Poor bugger." They say - though who knows if its true - that his shape is aeriform and subject to the slip and shod of moons, that his barometers are stuck on the foulest settings - that the lifeguard left Heather for a bimbo in bikinis - and that the wild cape of the south, protruding into the sea like a rude finger in a traffic snarl, suffers still from the lightning rod he drowned with when a cold front moves in from past the Twelve Apostles and the weather takes another turn for worse.