It was one of those days where you realize that "sky" is just another human construct, that the sky starts wherever the ground ends. Sky isn't just something way up out there, but also something that your head is swimming in all the time.
- John Green in The Anthropocene Reviewed, pg 225
I spent the conscious part of my first 10 years east of the Mississippi* and grew up under a sky that just was -- it did stuff, often unpredictably, and sometimes cool stuff. The sky was where the weather lived. It was where my dad worked (he flew fighter jets for the US Air Force); it was where I sometimes dreamed of following him, after reading children's biographies of the Wright brothers and building machines that flew on hope using the bamboo poles that came in our new carpet. It was where my kites sometimes went and were my dad's model planes usually went. The sky was where the indecipherable stars were and from whence fathoms-deep snow fell. It was where the sun strolled and behind which it was sometimes obscured and, once, the stage for its disappearing act. Like most things when we're kids, the sky was just so, a thing that was there, the way it was, unremarkable until someone remarked on it, seemingly as ambivalent to me as I was inattentive to it.
Then, concurrent with my father's return for a tour in Vietnam, we crossed North America's Great River to make a home a bare 15 miles inside the edge of the Mojave Desert in southern California -- and suddenly the sky was different. What made me notice was not the sky itself, but the lack of anything mediating it. The old accustomed horizon defined by nearby trees, hills, narrow streets, or neighbors' second stories had all vanished, leaving the pale dusty blue to fill the emptiness. At ten years old, I couldn't have named the difference, but I felt it: a boundlessness that can only come living in a place where you can always see the edge of the world.
In the desert, I started my time playing under the sky, chasing lizards and jumping ditches on bikes and mapping out the "unexplored" territory between the base and the Mojave river, boundlessness in the background. Two years later, the military sent our family to Albuquerque, New Mexico where my time under the Big Sky would settle into a groove. We lived near the edge of a plateau on the west side of the city in a house with a porch overlooking the valley and the dramatic Sandia Mountains beyond. My attention expanded with my adolescent capacities and I began to notice more particularly what was going on in that vast sky.
There, one can watch entire storms, top to bottom, east to west, wend their way across the desert floor. Curtains of rain -- locally called vigras, as I recall -- hang from the clouds but evaporate in the air in mocking tragedy above the desert floor. Thunderheads spread their anvils like empires, lit from beneath by the setting sun's fires of war, as evening burns down into sparkling nights. Two-mile high mountains become speed bumps over which cumulostratus clouds tumble like softly breaking waves. Usually, cloud bottoms there are about ten or eleven thousand feet, making the sky feel very far away indeed, but once in a great while, they drop, hiding the heights, scraping the world flat like a bottom trawler from Elysium and, though the horizon remains as far away as ever, nothing lives above it.
In and around the city, the night sky is as light-polluted as in any Eastern town, but, drive for an hour or two in the right direction and, slowly, tiny bright worlds beyond the sky blink into existence. Go far enough in the winter, when the atmosphere is clean and crisp, and the Milky Way is so bright that you can see the ground by it. Constellations get lost among the crowds of their quieter brethren; a passing cloud can be easily outlined as it obscures bits of the rhinestoned celestial sphere. Any sliver of moon glows like a burning brand and its fullness is almost blinding compared to the gentle enfoldment of luneless starlight.
I lived in Albuquerque for almost fourteen years and consider it home, as much as any Air Force brat has one. My parents lived there nearly half a century and traveled, leaving and returning to it multiple times, always under the enchantment of my father's wonder of its sky. In the first decade or so of living there, he flew the city's surrounds more times than I can know and chose the last house he and my mother lived in for the view of what was above the ground. I cannot visit now without looking up and thinking, "this is my father's sky."
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Like New Mexico, I never thought to come to Maryland; my path here was, as has been the case most of my life, wandering and characterized by unanticipated futures. After I left the West, I often romanticized (as above) the vastness, blueness, and starriness of its sky to my East Coast friends. In the blinding nights of Miami and New York City, I lamented the replacement of the pinpricked dome for a hazy orange one and, lost among the brick and brutalist towers of East Coast downtowns, a flat horizon for a vertical one. The DC suburbs, however, had a few flavors of my adopted home town: a tendency to build out rather than up -- indeed, there is a height limit in the District -- and a remarkable accessibility of the country, such that less than an hours' bike ride or a quarter hour by car can find a rolling quietude and relative emptiness in which the heart may take some peace.
As the exigencies of my life kept me in Maryland, my yen for the sky kept me looking up and, more and more, I found myself surprised by what I saw there: layered oceans of clouds, not miles up, but mere thousands or even hundreds of feet away; sun pillars, sun dogs, parhelic arcs shimmering and ephemeral; castle wall squalls and level grey cloud mantles. There is always a show in the sky here and it is never boring.
I've seen more kinds of clouds here than I knew existed. Of course, there are fluffy cumulus and gloomy stratus, feathery cirrus and towering nimbus, but also pendulous mammatus, magnificent gravity waves and humorous Kelvin-Helmholtz waves, updraft holes, microbursts, and roll clouds. And these embedded in large-to-huge weather systems like tornados and hurricanes and derechos, all of which I've seen and lived through here.** Except for cloudless days, I literally never look up without finding some enchantment made of water vapor wending its way past my ground-perch.
Even absent of clouds, the sky here parades a kaleidoscope above me. From the sapphire blues of September -- which, astonishingly, compete fairly with those of New Mexico -- to the pallid wash of a humid summer day, to the pinks, oranges, yellows, reds, indigos, and even greens of a sunset almost any day of the year, I've never lived in a place with such a color wheel above me. Rays crepuscular and anticrepuscular are to be seen as the sky lowers and Venus' belt lifts, while sunrises burst and sunsets crash in the summer but linger luxuriously through the horizon's naked trees across the winter.
I'm grateful for our five months of summer, even as I am jealous for more of it, but the weather in the remaining seven of not-summer still draws me into a wondrous fascination, however unpleasant it often is. During the cool seasons we get, of course, some snow, which I genuinely enjoy (so long as I don't have to move any of it), but I've learned that there are nearly endless variations on frozen and semi-frozen precipitation that other places I've lived seem to lack. Sleet, graupel, freezing rain, all varying degrees of nasty to be caught in, are nonetheless really interesting both as weather phenomena and as things you might find on your front porch. I had no idea that there were so many kinds of frost. Hail is my greatest anxiety -- and not limited to cool weather -- as I have no garage, so it therefore ever-threatens one of my greatest treasures, my car; enough so, that its interest for me as a meteorological marvel is eclipsed by my worries over dimpled bonnets and boots.
Just as with any metropolis, nights here are mostly dimmed by the brightness of the cities, yet, getting out into the darkness of a country night turns out to be less difficult than it feels out West. Probably due to the relative nearness of the horizon, it's not so hard to find a place where one can see some of the Milky Way or for enough stars to come out to make identifying constellations a challenge. It is not like the repleteness of a winter desert night, but it can be enough to recharge the batteries of one's soul.
I've been in Maryland now for longer than I've lived anywhere else; I anticipate that I will die here. I deeply love its sky, perhaps more even than that of my desert roots. A friend of mine is fond of saying, "Maryland gives good sky," and right she is. I grew up beneath my father's sky, but the endlessly changing sphere here sings to me, making music for my eyes like an infinite organ grinder, ever restless, even when at peace, churning and breathing like the underbelly of an insomniac dragon, ever lit from unexpected angles, at once sparkling and gloomy, purpling like royalty or a bruise, shining as only the firmament can.
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* The nitpickers among you will remind me that I was born in Texas and lived for two years in Arizona. Fair enough; however, the only memories I have that might possibly be ascribable to that time are indiscernible from dreams and imagination.
** The hurricanes that have come through the DC/Baltimore area, of course, are faint shadows of Hurricane Andrew, which my brother and I survived on August 24, 1992 in Miami.
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