To Infinity and Beyond–!
I spent my first [cough] years east of the Mississippi, bopping around between Western NY, Western PA, Ohio, Kentucky, Virgina… Anyway, I saw plenty of skies over plenty of terrain. And of course I had heard of those big Western skies, but y’know, I figured the Earth and sky are the same size wherever you go.
I was wrong.
Stunningly wrong.
I can’t explain it, but ha! I don’t have to. I just know it hit me in the face when I first stepped off the plane, and it kept me boggling for quite some time. “It makes no sense!”
I’ve given up figuring it out. Now I just take pictures of it. Whenever I can.
One evening in New Mexico…
Tags: land, New Mexico
February 29th, 2012 at 08:40
When I spent three years in the East, after growing up in south Texas, I felt the whole time I was living “shut in” by the lack of sky. Even when it was clear (which it usually wasn’t) and even when I was up on top of the Blue Ridge…there was no real SKY. I remember being on a mountain (so-called) in West Virginia where they boasted that on a clear day you could see eleven miles. Eleven! I was used to seeing thirty or forty from every gentle rise, an easy seventy from the terrace of my piano teacher’s house.
The way I finally explained it to people who didn’t get it was that a painter could paint landscapes in the East (assuming not at the shore or anything) and did not have to know how to paint clouds. Just a plain pale blue or some shade of gray would do, and the painting could be perfectly accurate and evocative of the place. But a western painter MUST be able to paint Sky in all its glory–every variety of cloud and clear sky, every shade of color the sky becomes and shares with the earth.
One easterner who visited here–whom we took on a visit to a friend’s ranch, kept kind of flinching and I finally realized it was too much sky (just as I had felt constricted by too little.) “It’s so…OPEN…” she said. Yes. That.
The air’s more polluted now in the Southwest, which I hate–I miss the clarity we had–but the sky above still dwarfs the earth.
February 29th, 2012 at 08:53
wow, spectacular. thanks for sharing.
February 29th, 2012 at 09:15
Yes yes! Too many trees back East. Eleven miles! snort! Can see from here to mt Taylor-80 easy–nearly the length of Delaware…A friend said at first it felt like she was going to blow off the landscape in NM because it was so open, but once she got used to it, anything else is suffocating.
February 29th, 2012 at 12:18
The last time I went back east, I felt quite claustrophobic. “Don’t be silly!” I told myself. But I didn’t listen.
February 29th, 2012 at 12:19
Robert–and I swear, the camera really can’t capture it. No matter how I try!
February 29th, 2012 at 21:43
Truth is if you could really capture what you see or even close to it, most people would say that can’t be real she must have photoshoped it.
Had I known 40 years ago that I would want to shoot sunsets from my front yard I would likely have bought a house on the top of a hill instead of toward the bottom.
March 1st, 2012 at 20:50
I’ve enjoyed visiting in the East but still feel smothered…though a walk in a real deciduous forest in early spring or in the autumn is glorious. Once I found a little glade along the Appalachian Trail that was floored in violets and ferns–leaves just coming out overhead so the light was filtered, wavery green-gold, like being underwater. And the violets were in bloom. And one walk in upstate NY in October…magical. But not forever. I need to be outside, and under trees is inside.
March 2nd, 2012 at 09:40
I love the eastern woods–I spent so much time in them. I had a spring/glade of my own, once…
March 2nd, 2012 at 09:41
Well, that was me and not Connery. I do get confused.