The Comfort of Obscurity

There is a cumulonimbus thundercloud that forms above the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia around 2PM almost every afternoon between September to March (taking a short break in January). This particular cloud is formed by the unique shape and placement of a pair of islands as well as convection — ocean air being warmed as it moves over the land and then pushed upward. For this reason, it has earned the moniker “Hector the Convector.”

The name of the cloud, “Hector,” has an etymological link to the word “echo.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that this particular storm, like a voice rebounding from a canyon wall, consistently returns to the place of origin. Since Hector is such a predictable and recurring thunderstorm, he (admittedly, this particular pronoun feels odd here, but I can’t be bothered to consult my Chicago Manual of Style on the gendering of weather phenomenon, and I don’t know that the cloud would mind much anyway) has been the subject of a number of scientific studies with impossibly long names like “Evolution of maritime continent thunderstorms under varying meteorological conditions over the Tiwi Islands.”

There are two things that I find interesting about Hector, the first and most obvious of which is the fact that he has a name — and a human name at that. The second, which I will get to in a moment, is that he does not exist.

1. The Act of Naming

I used to know more about the act of naming. It’s been too long since graduate school and I can no longer recall any of the things I was supposed to have learned from Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (except that it would be relevant to bring up in a discussion on names and naming). If I remember right, it was not an essay but some sort of a short story.

I remember the room I was in when we discussed it in some sort of critical theory seminar. I even remember the exact location of the chair I occupied near the window. That particular room always felt claustrophobic to me, and watching the barren tree branches outside of Voorhies scratching at the winter sky allowed me to think about something other than my irrational fear that the room would collapse and we would all suffocate in a pile of rubble. A few of the others were pronouncing Nabokov just slightly differently than I thought they would have (with an emphasis on the second syllable), so I tried hard to discuss him without saying his name. I remember asking too many questions and still not understanding, though that is something that I can recall from almost every stage of my life. All this to say I have nothing particularly smart to say about the act of naming something except that I tend to think of it as a means of understanding something and then of taming it.

Several years ago, Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. The book is both a highly detailed study of different species of moss while simultaneously not really a book about moss at all. You could think of it more accurately as a meditation on our relationship with the natural world (with a definite emphasis on moss).

Most of the mosses in Kimmerer’s book are known only by their binomial Latin names like Leucobryum glaucum, Dicranum scoparium, and Hypnum imponens. Kimmerer viewed naming and the act of learning a name as the first step toward a respect and understanding of the natural world. At the same time, she acknowledges her own hesitancy to use these assigned names. “I think the task given to me is to carry out the message that mosses have their own names,” she writes. The actual names, she seems to suggest, are both unpronounceable and unknowable to humans (it’s worth acknowledging that this is an unfair and incomplete distillation of Kimmerer’s book and is only one of many, many things she says about the names of plants).

The act of naming things in the natural world is inherently reductive at best, but at least the latin names are sometimes informative. Fontinalis antipyretica, for example, was thought to be useful in preventing fire from spreading, and it does not take a great latin scholar to locate “anti” and “pyro” in the name. But what does it mean when the assigned name, like Hector, is one generally reserved for humans?

The most obvious parallel to Hector is the phenomenon of naming tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s an odd tradition if one takes even just a few seconds to think about it. If nothing else captures humanity’s over-inflated ego, it is the fact that when a natural storm’s destructive potential crosses a certain high threshold, we acknowledge it’s strength by giving it a name normally reserved for human beings.

This particular tradition began in 1953 with a tropical storm that began in late May in the warm waters east of Nicaragua. That storm was given the name “Alice”. Additional storm names followed in alphabetical order (Barbara, Carol, Dolly, Edna, etc.).

In 1954, the exact same names were used again with one exception. The year prior, a storm formed on October 2 near the southern coast of Cuba and had been given the name Gail. It was later decided that “gale” (a word often used to describe strong winds in a nautical context) and “Gail” was too confusing as a homonym pair. “Gilda” was used in 1954 instead.

Prior to Alice, the protocol was to name storms in the Atlantic with the phonetic military alphabet. From 1950–1952, Tropical storm Alice would have been “Tropical Storm Alpha”, followed by “Hurricane Bravo”, and so on. From 1953 until 1979 only female names were used for storms, though I will leave it to some other writer or thinker to determine what meaning, if any, this has.

Kimmerer told us that the act of naming and learning the names of mosses was the beginning of knowing them — the same holds true for hurricanes as well. It is no coincidence that shortly after we started naming them, the US Army Signal Corps and the National Weather Service began to fly planes at high altitude above storm clouds in the gulf in order to begin to study the movement, duration, and power of these weather patterns. The National Hurricane Center became a tropical cyclone warning center in 1956, less than three years after Tropical Storm Alice.

I find it interesting that there are a host of regular natural phenomenon that I have no name for. Nothing for the annual return of Chinook salmon to the Sacramento river, just one mile west of my front door. Nothing for the sudden presence of large carpenter bees in the spring, or the first rain after a long dry summer. Is there a word for the awakening of periodical cicadas? I’d like for there to be one for the Chinook in particular, though all of these are all generative acts of nature. Perhaps we are saving the people names for more destructive acts.

2. The Debatable Existence of Hector and, by Proxy, Myself

In September of 1991, I took my my first transatlantic flight. I was 10 years old, and somehow already bored with the safety demonstrations and the taxiing and waiting before the sudden roar of the engines at take-off. As we gained speed and then lifted off, I watched the view outside my small oval window change from the JFK terminal to parking garages and hotels to the calm water of Jamaica Bay and Long Island in the distance, but then all of that disappeared suddenly. The view outside the window was an all-encompassing gray. My breath stopped in my throat when I realized we had flown into a cloud. It had never occurred to me that a plane could simply fly through it as though the cloud wasn’t there at all.

As I write this, what was once a large thundercloud some 20km up in the atmosphere is likely fading into whisps and whispers of his former self. Perhaps the moon is finally allowed offer some light to the the tiny villages of Milikapiti and Pularumpi. In a few hours, the morning sun will come up over the Pacific Ocean to the west and begin to warm the land. The damp ocean air will move upward and collect and some completely new thing will accept the name of its predecessor.

There is no “Hector the Convector,” because the cloud that bore that name has dispersed. This is the cycle. The absence of the cloud is as much a part of it as the arrival. What accumulates and takes a familiar shape and pushes through the tropopause in a similar fashion it is not in fact the same. It has never been the same. I think the name, therefore, must be for the pattern — not the storm, but I, like Joni Mitchell, “really don’t know clouds at all.”

This particular thought—the one about the patterns and the storm and who the name was for — occurred to me in the middle of the night. I was awake again at some impossible hour (I admit I have not been sleeping well recently, due in some part to another lingering bout of depression) and standing in front of the open refrigerator door trying to remember whether or not I even like apple sauce and when was the last time I had some? And though I couldn’t tell you in what order I had the following three thoughts, because I think they all arrived on the same train at the same time, this is what occurred to me then:

1. The cloud is gone in the morning, so the name is for the pattern and not the storm
2. I wonder how long the cloud was there before a human being even saw it. Before it was named. A hundred thousand years? A million?
3. I love apple sauce. I don’t know why I ever stopped eating it.

And so I sat for awhile in the darkened kitchen with what could only be called an ambitiously large bowl of applesauce and maybe did a little thinking but mostly didn’t. A hundred useless things called for my attention, but I didn’t answer and allowed the moment to be empty and quiet and devoid of any electronic glow or hum. I wondered a bit then about what it would be to exist in the world for a thousand or so years or more without a name, and, to be quite frank, there was enough applesauce in the bowl that I made it all the way to understanding that I do not have a name, either.

I, of course, have a name. But I don’t have a name.

We tend to refer to crossing a certain high threshold of recognition as “making a name for yourself”, and I am under no delusions about myself here. Only late last year did I even begin to think of my writing not as a perpetually-underdeveloped side career, or, for that matter, a career at all. Why was “career” the word I used to describe these decades of art making? I am, in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, so steeped in the language of Capitalism that I still find its insidious claws reaching into the way I think and talk about creative work — Will this grow my audience? Is this publishable? Who wants to read 3,000 words about a recurring meteorological event in Australia? Will this sell?

It requires a bit of undoing in order to redirect the ambition away from an end-all book deal from Random House, or away from meeting the expectations of a perceived audience, or even in having any audience at all. I have already made more of this than I wanted to, but there is a certain comfort in accepting one’s own obscurity. The grace of anonymity is total freedom. But I digress from what was never supposed to become a treatise on creative work.

3. Counting to Ten Billion

The McDonald’s in my tiny, midwestern hometown spent the closing decades of the 20th century boasting of its own popularity with a large sign out front. Even as someone who, in the 80s, was primarily occupied with consuming happy meals and navigating the astroturf-floored burger tunnels in the PlayPlace, I was wholly confused by the enormity of the numbers. This was fueled in part by the fact that the sign loomed over the play area and served as the only source of shade. Astroturf gets blisteringly hot in the sun, and so an awareness of the “OVER 10 BILLION SERVED” sign was a necessary and pragmatic matter. I don’t have the sort of memory that would let me recall the exact number, except that it exceeded the population of the earth at that time.

My most significant memory of McDonald’s then, is one of confusion about the number 10 billion. Have they completed 10 billion orders? If one person orders five sandwiches, does that count as one or five? If two people share a McRib, does that count as one or two? If someone only orders fries, do they count the fries? Maybe everyone on earth has eaten McDonalds plus another 5 billion who ate a Big Mac and then died?

I had seen hand-held chrome tally counters being used by the employees who manned the gates at Peony Amusement Park. It was one of the few devices that I understood completely, and so I assumed they were everywhere. Each McDonald’s had one, I was sure. Maybe there was an employee who watched the door and silently pressed the tab when I came in, advancing the number by just one. We didn’t go to McDonald’s too often, but every time we did, I had the same thought when I came through the door:

10 BILLION AND ONE.

1987, which included the summer of the burger tunnel astroturf burns, saw in July the population of the earth crossing the threshold of 5 billion. The year I graduated high school, it was 6 billion, anyone it will hit 9 billion next year. In my lifetime, it is very likely that I will see the human population of the earth literally double in size.

McDonalds, as it turns out, was counting burgers, not people. If they had hand-held counters, they put them away when the numbers reached 100 billion. Best guesses put them somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 billion now.

It is impossible, in the face of these enormous numbers, not to feel completely swallowed whole. The more time I spend trying to looking at population numbers and growth patterns, the more I feel myself disappearing. None of this was aided by my compulsively checking COVID statistics to understand vaccination numbers and hospitalizations as a percentage of county population and so on. It is a difficult feeling to get used to, and I have been swimming in it since around the time that Hector appeared again above the Tiwi Islands after a long dry summer last year.

Some time in the next few weeks, the southern hemisphere will grow slightly cooler and the sun will not warm the land or the water enough to bring Hector back to us, and here is where this long thunderstorm season has cast me upon the shore:

To be completely lost, as it turns out, is not all that bad.

I have, by now, become quite comfortable with all of the things that I don’t know and the degree to which I am lost (and amunder the general impression that we all know very little about the universe but are in varying stages of being honest with ourselves about this). We are, as it turns out, all in this together. You, me and a few billion Big Mac eaters. You, me, and a thunderstorm named Hector, and a hurricane named Michael, and the willow moss wedged between the clay brick chimneys and the walls of an old Nordic home. Some of us are doing people things and some of us are doing storm things or moss things (all of which are lost things).

Hector was given his name first by aviators lost above the pacific, looking for a landmark to help them find home. If there is a map, and if there is any hope in finding ourselves, it must begin with learning each other’s names.

Perhaps then, we can start with an introduction.

Hello.

My name is Johnny.