Treatise on the Efficient Cause of the Flow and Ebb

A story inspired by the discoveries of the jet stream.

I. Earthbound 
The final steps were a torture. He wasn't an old man – he was in his prime, theoretically – but the final scrabbling over rocky ground, balancing his equipment, nearly did him in. 

After another precarious half an hour, he found a suitable site and set his packs down with practiced precision. His paper was due back to the university in six months, and yet his field research was getting him nowhere despite his rigor and dedication. Balloons released day after day, floating in irregular patterns, swirling currents, disappearing into the clouds above the clouds of cherry blossoms. 

He arranged his equipment, half a mile higher on the mountainside than he'd ever been. He paused to sip hot tea from his thermos and watch the clouds, the lakes, the ocean, the sunrise, the tiny speck of his auto far below. He noted, pure instinct, the temperature, the barometric pressure, the prevailing winds. Where was this instinct when it came to her? 

He set his tea down and applied himself to the pilot balloons. As he did every time he trudged up the mountainside, he tied bits of paper to every balloon, her name written precisely on each slip. He would watch their erratic patterns, watch her disappear. Looking at his watch, he released each balloon in regular intervals, her name written slowly, reverently this time, a silent prayer. He settled in on his camp chair, lighting a cigarette, his pencil and notebook at the ready. He glanced at the sweeping hand of the stopwatch, then again at the balloons drifting away, dancing on the currents aloft. 

And then, suddenly, the first balloon was swept away, as if by a stream, on a path straight as an arrow and as fast, faster. He stood, the cigarette dangling forgotten on his lips. The next balloon was whipped away, and the next, and the next. 

He paused, breathing suspended: a new discovery. A new air current, the break he needed. The key to his career. He watched the balloons speed away, out of sight within minutes. "She is gone," he whispered, crushing the cigarette out under his heel. 

He noted the presumed airspeed, and the time. 

II. Airborne 

He knew he was going to die. 

Before the end of the year, 1933. It wasn't a fortune teller or a strange dream that told him so. He just had a feeling. Could sense it in the ebb and the flow of the currents swirling around his airplane. 

This was the highest he'd ever flown, and it made him feel both smug and exhilarated. The special pressurized suit he'd had made just for this flight was doing what it was supposed to – protecting him, his lungs, his organs from the thinning air at 20,000 feet. Cheating death. For now. 

He enjoyed flying around the world primarily because he enjoyed the notoriety he got when he landed, back at home, safe and sound. But if he were honest with himself, which he rarely was, he liked being high above the earth. The dustbowl of Oklahoma looked almost indistinguishable from the deserts of north Africa, beautiful in its starkness, far removed and foreign. She was down there, somewhere, grit in her eyes, shielding them from the sun, looking for him. 

And then, the desert of the Midwest seemed to be flying past faster than it should be. "Is this how it ends?" he wondered aloud, though his words were tattered by the wind as they left his mouth. Is dying speeding, flying faster, until the world breaks up? He checked his gauges: his ground speed was outpacing his air speed by a noticeable amount. A significant amount. He grinned. The ebb and flow of the currents were gone. This was a pistol shot, straight, fast, and true. 

III. Drowning 

He was drowning in ideas. 

There was so much to learn, write, think, explain, translate, discover. The whole world, and the heavens: it was up to him to make it clear, for the caliphs, yes, but for himself as well. Ideas, ideas, ideas. The greatest mind in the world, so it was said. Strings of words, scores of assistants, multitudes of beautiful, perfect experiments: currents of ideas, swirling eddies of the mind. 

He looked up from his writing, out the window at the Tigris, sluggish and brown, its ebbing tide leaving a dirty mark behind on the quay. "What will be left behind when I am gone?" he wondered aloud. "And who will care?" 

Leaving aside his papers, he walked out onto the balcony, feeling old. The heat was thick and stifling, and he made a mental note to include temperature in his experiments on flow and ebb. He looked into the burning sky, shielding his eyes. Is there a flow and an ebb to the clouds, to the sky itself? So much left to learn, to discover, so little time. No time for her, when there was all of the world to understand and explain. The flow and the ebb. He was drowning in ideas.

Treatise on the Efficient Cause of the Ebb and Flow by Julie K. Rose is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at juliekrose.com.