Chicago Sky

I’ll say it pre-emptively, so you don’t have to: Enough with the cloud pictures already.

OK, sure. But first, you have to figure out a way to stop days like today in Chicago from happening. A long-advertised severe weather front moved through in the late afternoon after hours of building southwest winds. I was up in Evanston, a couple miles west of the lake, when I saw what appeared to be a huge thunderstorm in the south and southwest; it looked like it wouldn’t make it as far north as I was, so I shot a few pictures at the park where I was stopped, then got in the car to drive back to my dad’s place. But when I got in the car, I turned on the radio and heard that the storm I was seeing was a severe thunderstorm moving across the middle of Chicago (with wind gusts as high as 74 mph; an example, I think, of a type of severe thunderstorm front called a derecho). Since the storm seemed to be passing safely by, I decided to drive out to the lake shore and watch it move out across the water.

To dispel any suspense: I didn’t wind up in the middle of the tempest. But the people out there on the beach got a good view of the storm at a distance, along with what I’d call, if I were given to such outbursts, a truly wondrous display of light and color in the huge cloud mass that sprawled across the shoreline.

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