When I was first in the Ituri Forest, I Noticed there were many kinds of plantains grown in the gardens there They varied by size and shape. One version seemed to have numerous black spots on the outside. When asking what it was called, I found its name was the same as the variety without the black spots. Eventually, someone realized that I was asking the wrong question, and gave me the explanation I was unknowingly looking for: “The ones with the black spots were the ones at a certain ripening stage during a storm in which rocks made of water in the form of what you call ice cream, sort of”
That is how you say “hail damage” in a tropical country in a a shared language with limited vocabulary in that shared language for frozen things.
Eventually, I got to see plenty of hail in the Ituri, and of course, we have it here as well. Now and then, in fact, the hail in Minnesota gets interesting. Here is a photograph of a storm last July that affected just a hundred acres or so of landscape out near Rice, on Route 10:
That’s Julia in the picture, and speaking of Julia, she just sent me this YouTube video of a different hail storm, down in Oklahoma five days ago:
OMG indeed.
Imagine living in a non-science based society in a region where hail storms happen to be rare, and then one of these suckers comes along. It happens you’re busy writing up the holy scriptures for your society, because you happen to be the holy scribe guy. This would probably get a chapter.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
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