Sebastion Junger
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Certain days leave us with indelible impressions, impressions that were that much more vivid when we were children. Hi, I'm meteorologist Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

When I was a kid, the weather seemed more intense, mysterious, new. The brilliance of a blue sky, the depth of the snow, the force of the wind. Each of us holds in our memories the imprint of weather. We spoke recently to Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, about his most intense weather experience, and it's not, as you might expect, an experience of the power and fury of the elements, but rather something infinitely more subtle.

"I grew up in New England so some of my most intense memories and feelings from childhood are associated with, you know, really clean, clear fall days and its impossible for me to smell woodsmoke on a clear, sharp day and not think of being a child in New England in the fall. I remember I was working overseas, in a war actually, as a journalist and it was summer and it was starting to get cold and I stepped on a dead leaf on the pavement in Zagra, Croatia and it was a dead Oak leaf and just the sound of that crackling made me instantly homesick, and so in a way, that's my most intense experience with weather."

That was author Sebastian Junger. Here at The Weather Notebook, we collect stories about the weather. If you have a good one, give us a call and leave it on our answering machine. Our number is 1-888-724-6001. Our Senior Consulting Producer is Jay Allison and our engineer is Sean Doucette. Funding is provided by the National Science Foundation with additional support from Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive.