Gawking at the Sky

(It's a virtue, I think.)

Over the past few days, I've been transcribing the travel journal I wrote on my first volunteer-vacation trip, to two different farms in Washington state back in 2010. I have a lot of thoughts about this trip, but what keeps cracking me up is the inordinate amount of time 21-year-old me spent writing about the sky. 

Here I was, learning farming and gardening skills for the first time, meeting new people, encountering ideas such as permaculture and toxic heteronormativity and humanure composting and anarchism, and instead of writing about these, I just wouldn't shut up about the sky. 

Some excerpts: 

"A tapestry of clouds stretches out beneath me: thin stippled sheets of white, punctuated by fluffy columns of cumulus. I can see a vague impression of the landscape below, hazy through the atmosphere: rectangles of green and tan, marked over with sprawling lines of dark green. Take-off was breathtaking. Gray clouds hung low in the sky, and the plane roared into the middle of them. I caught a glimpse of the rapid miniaturization, cars shrinking to pinheads, trees reduced to broccoli florets. Then all was pale gray for a minutes, and the plane burst out into a narrow strip of sky between the lower and upper cloud banks. Far away on the cloud horizons, billowing white thunderheads stood starkly against a strip of sky. Great wisps of cloud slithered by like foam on an invisible beach. Then the plan vanished into the upper clouds, ran into some violent turbulence that bounced me around in my seat, then emerged above the clouds and floated along in this magical world…

"My first impression of Portland was green and gray: green forest, gray sky. The skies here are cloudy as only western skies can be. Missouri has mastered the art of unbroken dreariness, but in the west, gray skies are never boring. The clouds billow and roil, display a 3D view of layered strata, dance around by the hour and surprise us with glimpses of clear sky. I like it already…

"Now I'm sitting in a rose garden perched on a bluff to the west of the city center. The clouds have broken up to reveal a hot September sky…

"The sky was typical of Washington: billows of nimbus that played tug-of-war with splashes of warm sunshines…

"I snacked on blackberries, watched puffy little clouds drift through the sky, and listened to the water and fire's murmured conversation…

"Physically-demanding work, combined with a break in the weather that smeared blue like cobalt paint across the sky, lifted my mood…

"I'm sitting on a  boulder overlooking the sound at Myrtle-Edwards Park, beneath a vibrant blue sky. To my left, cumulus and stratus clouds garnish the horizon, dwindling to distant clumps of cotton clustered around the blue silhouettes of the Cascade Mountains…. I had intended to stay inside and work, but the clouds were blazed across a heartbreak blue sky, and I couldn't go inside!

"I wolfed down breakfast, bid Seattle farewell under swiftly-moving clouds and hopped a ferry to Bainbridge Island…

"[On the plane] I gaze out at the ragged woolen comforter of clouds beneath us…"

As much as I wish my 21-year-old self had spent more time describing what she was learning and the people she was with, I can't be mad at her for gawking at the sky. The sky is beautiful, after all, and it is different in the Northwest than it is here in Missouri. As younger me felt my eyes opened to different ways of life, different ways of viewing the world and new ways of trying to mend it, I looked at clouds and tried to capture at least them with words. 

My vocabulary at the time didn't have room for what I was experiencing, but I could still gawk at the sky. And I still can.

~~~