"Magnificent" is the only word for what the sky was doing as I drove home
yesterday. We don't get clouds all that often in this desert, but when we do, we
get scenic ones. They are especially impressive because you can see so many of
them -- on the road I take to get home, I can see many 160 degrees of sky, and it
would be a full 180 but that there are mountains on all sides. This still amazes
me because I grew up on a street where the sky only shows between the tops of
rowhouses. Never saw a horizon except on trips down the shore. Never saw a rainbow
until I was grown. Yesterday I drove home as the sun was low, getting ready to
set. Opposite it, arching down from a low clooud to a mountain was a vivid snatch
of rainbow.
The clouds were piled in tattered and riotous layers and
the sun came through them in odd ways -- turning a snip of cloud to silver here
and pouring gold across a mountain slope there, turning an isolated section of
town to a shining city in a valley, and somehow reflecting a spray of beams
up across dark clouds.
After a while, as the sun lowered, the
layers of cloud melded to more uniform grays and big drops of rain fell on the
windshield for a few minutes. Later, though, the setting sun lifted through the
clouds again and the clouds opposite shone rose and gold, then it set and the
western clouds were layers of red and purple. I was listening to a tape of the
one-man John Muir show performed regularly in Yosemite[1], which heightened my
appreciation for natural beauty.
This morning on the ride in, I saw
the rising sun, big and round in my rear view mirror. A couple of days ago if I
had had a camera I would have pulled the car over and stopped, because the full
moon was big and low over Four Peaks, and the air was clear enough to show the
details of the mountains.
Parts of my drive home are beautiful every
day, with views across relatively unspoiled desert to mountains. The light on the
mountains changes every few minutes and the desert becomes more or less green
depending on rainfall or lack of it. If I could change it I wouldn't give up the
commute entirely, just extract the best 15 minutes from the middle of it. Whenever
we do move from this desert, I think the wide open sky is what I'll miss
most.
[1]Lee Stetson, who wrote the show and has performed it for
years, was recently elected as a Mariposa County supervisor. There's apparently
some question whether the election was a tribute to Stetson or to his alter ego
Muir, though Stetson says it doesn't really matter much, since his own views don't
differ from Muir's in any significant way.