Holy Flying Lentils

A telescope, coming rain, Esau’s mess of pottage, and a unicorn. Which one doesn’t belong? You were thinking unicorn, right? It’s imaginary. It has four legs.

But wait! A Key Peninsula unicorn is a real-life biped wearing an inflated pink costume. You were right about the unicorn, though. And not because of its legs.

Do telescopes, weather, and Bible food actually have anything in common? Other than not having legs.

Did you think, lentils?

If you did, you must have remembered that the word lentil comes from the Latin noun for the legume, lens, lentis.

Lenses in telescopes are ground to be shaped like lentils, round with double convex surfaces to refract the light coming from distant stars and planets.

In 1690, when astronomers began calling their new optics a lens, they were practicing the same kind of metaphorical thinking we do when an innovation borrows an old term for a new technology. The 1984 Mac computer had a mouse that wasn’t a mouse. Today’s earbuds are not buds, and tablets aren’t tablets. The 17th-century lenses weren’t lentils either, but the name stuck.

And the mess of pottage story with the quarreling twins, Jacob and Esau, in Genesis 25?

Remember, if you can, Sunday School. Esau stumbled home from the hunt one day and caught an enticing whiff of the lentil stew Jacob had simmering in the kitchen. Esau was so hungry that he impulsively traded his entire inheritance from Isaac for a bowl of it.

Hebrew experts working for King James in England 400 years ago translated Jacob’s lentil dish as pottage. For them, pottage was an everyday boiled stew of leftovers. For us, pottage is just another antique word you have to look up in the dictionary — like mess, which used to mean one of the courses in a meal rather than what teenagers leave behind in the kitchen.

No one knows exactly what the recipe was for that mouth-watering dish Jacob was making. Maybe it was something like dal in classic South Asian cuisine. What we do know is that Esau’s mess of pottage was made with lentils and that Jacob’s stew seduced Esau into giving away his birthright. Esau, eternal model of the perils of instant gratification. And ordering dinner when you’re famished.

What have lentils to do with rainy weather?

Readers on the Key Peninsula know that when we see a lens-shaped cloud perched above the summit of Mount Rainier, dry weather is ending, and rain is on the way.

Of course, you philologists guessed we were headed into lenticular clouds as soon as lentils were invoked.

After all, that lenticular cloud on Mount Rainier does look like a lentil. Or a lens. Sort of. 

Lenticular came to us from lenticula, the diminutive form of the Latin noun (itsy-bitsy lentil), a redundancy if there ever was one.

No sooner did she catch sight of a cute little lentil cloud than Dorothy got the feeling that she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. You never see lenticulars in the flat Midwest, since lenticular clouds, like Leslie West, bucket lists, avalanches, and ski lodges, are orographic, “mountain written.”

Our Mount Rainier lenticular clouds appear when warm, moist air flowing in from the Pacific is pushed up above Rainier’s 14,000 feet and cools. The condensed vapor in that characteristic lentil shape we see from down here at sea level is the sure-fire prediction of coming rain, something full-time employees looking forward to sunny outdoor weekends hate to see on summer Fridays.

Photos of lenticular clouds floating above The Mountain are a cliché of Northwest landscape photography. Rare is the Puget Sound photo calendar that doesn’t have a spectacular image of one.

Unlike Kansas, there are plenty of mountains in France, so the French have a quaint expression for multiple lenticulars when they see them layered above the Alps. Anyone stuck washing the dishes knows what all those dirty dinner plates look like, so the French kitchen help call them a “pile d’assiettes,” a stack of dishes.

In gritty weather talk at the Tacoma IHOP, people don’t put on airs with effete imports like assiettes. They stick to the good ole American vernacular and call layered lenticulars a “stack of pancakes.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a dude call lenticulars frisbee clouds.

There’s another bit of lentil-related Northwest folklore, one almost as cherished as the legend of D.B. Cooper. 

Something screamed by Kenneth Arnold’s little airplane’s cockpit as he flew near Mount Rainier one day in June 1947. He saw spaceships flying in V-formation. When Arnold landed, he breathlessly described them as flying saucers. For the incredulous, he sketched from memory the disks. A subsequent U.S. Air Force buzzkill report explained that they were just lenticular clouds. So much for the first eye-witnessed UFO visit to Planet Earth.

With his uneducated palate, Arnold called the spacecraft flying saucers, not flying lentils, which probably had a lot to do with their long-term popularity.

Thanks to Kenneth Arnold, we’ve been seeing flying saucers in comic books and cartoons for 78 years now. Not even the magnificent studio contraptions of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and all the Star Wars and Star Trek movies have overcome the lenticular saucer as the preferred shape of visiting aliens’ space vehicles.

Lenses, lenticular clouds, flying saucers, and pottage all have hidden lentils lurking in their stories.

Hmm, it’s a chilly December day, and, like Esau, I could go for a mess of lentil curry right now.

Oh, in case you were wondering, unicorns eat stardust and moonbeams, not lentils.

Dan Clouse lives in Lakebay.