A Natural History of the Senses (35 page)

I am sitting at the edge of the continent, at Point Reyes National Seashore, the peninsula north of San Francisco, where the land gives way to the thrall of the Pacific and the arching blue conundrum of the sky. When cricket-whine, loud as a buzz saw, abruptly quits, only bird calls map the quiet codes of daylight. A hawk leans into nothingness, peeling a layer of flight from thin air. At first it flaps hard to gain a little altitude, then finds a warm updraft and cups the air with its wings, spiraling up in tight circles as it eyes the ground below for rodents or rabbits. Banking a little wider, it turns slowly, a twirling parasol. The hawk knows instinctively that it will not fall. The sky is the one visual constant in all our lives, a complex backdrop to our every venture, thought, and emotion. Yet we tend to think of it as
invisible—an absence, not a substance. Though we move through air’s glassy fathoms, we rarely picture it as the thick heavy arena it is. We rarely wonder about the blue phantasm we call the sky.
“Skeu
,” I say out loud, the word that our ancient ancestors used; I try to utter it as they might have, with fear and wonder:
“Skeu.”
Actually, it was their word for a covering of any sort. To them, the sky was a roof of changing colors. Small wonder they billeted their gods there, like so many quarrelsome neighbors who, in fits of temper, hurled lightning bolts instead of crockery.

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of
The Tempest
. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.

Without thinking, we often speak of “an empty sky.” But the sky is never empty. In a mere ounce of air, there are 1,000 billion trillion gyrating atoms made up of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, each a menagerie of electrons, quarks, and ghostly neutrinos. Sometimes we marvel at how “calm” the day is, or how “still” the night. Yet there is no stillness in the sky, or anywhere else where life and matter meet. The air is always vibrant and aglow, full of volatile gases, staggering spores, dust, viruses, fungi, and animals, all stirred by a skirling and relentless wind. There are active flyers like butterflies, birds, bats, and insects, who ply the air roads; and there are passive flyers like autumn leaves, pollen, or milkweed pods, which just float. Beginning at the earth and stretching up in all directions, the sky is the thick, twitching realm in which we live. When we say that our distant
ancestors crawled out onto the land, we forget to add that they really moved from one ocean to another, from the upper fathoms of water to the deepest fathoms of air.

The prevailing winds here are from the west, as I can see from the weird and wonderful shapes of the vegetation along the beach. A light steady breeze blowing off the Pacific has swept back the wild grasses into a sort of pompadour. A little farther back, in a more protected glade, I find a small clump of them, around which a circle runs in the dirt. It looks as if someone pressed a cookie cutter down in the ground, but the wind alone has done it, blowing the grass around and turning it into a natural protractor. We think of the wind as a destructive force—a sudden funnel that pops a roof off a schoolhouse in Oklahoma—but the wind is also a gradual and powerful mason that carves cliffs, erodes hillsides, re-creates beaches, moves trees and rocks down mountains or across rivers. Wind creates waves, as in the sensuously rippling dunes of Death Valley or along the changing shorelines. The wind hauls away the topsoil as if it were nothing more than a dingy tablecloth on the checkerboard fields of the Midwest, creating a “dust bowl.” It can power generators, gliders, windmills, kites, sailboats. It sows seeds and pollen. It sculpts the landscape. Along rugged coasts, one often sees trees dramatically carved by the relentless wind.

The north wind is shown on ancient maps as a plump-cheeked man with tousled hair and a strained expression, blowing as hard as he can. According to Homer, the god Aeolus lived in a palatial cave, where he kept the winds tied up in a leather bag. He gave the bag to Odysseus to power his ship, but when Odysseus’s comrades opened the bag the winds raced free throughout the world, squabbling and whirling and generally wreaking havoc. “The children of morning,” Hesiod called the Greek winds. To the ancient Chinese,
fung
meant both wind and breath, and there were many words for the wind’s temperaments.
Tiu
meant “to move with the wind like a tree.”
Yao
was the word for when something floated on the breeze like down. The names of winds are magical, and tell a lot about the many moods the sky can take. There’s Portugal’s hillside
vento coado;
Japan’s demonic
tsumuji
, or soft pine-grove-loving
matsukaze;

Australia’s balmy
brickfielder
(which first described dust storms blowing off brickyards near Sydney); America’s moist warm
chinook
drifting in from the sea, and named after the language of Indians who settled Oregon; or snow-clotted
blizzard
, or fierce
Santa Ana
, or Hawaii’s humid
waimea;
North Africa’s hot, sand-laden desert
simoom
(from the Aramaic word
samma
, “poison”); Argentina’s baking, depleting
zonda
, which pours down from the Andes to sweep the pampas; the Nile’s dark, gloomy
haboob;
Russia’s gale-force
buran
, bringing a storm in the summer or a blizzard in the winter; Greece’s refreshing summer
etesian;
Switzerland’s warm, gusty
foehn
blowing off the leeward slopes of a mountain; France’s dry cold
mistral
(“master wind”) squalling through the Rhône Valley and down to the Mediterranean coast; India’s notorious
monsoon
, whose very name means a whole season of monsoons; the Cape of Good Hope’s
bull’s-eye squall;
Alaska’s petulent
williwaw;
Gibraltar’s easterly-blowing
datoo;
Spain’s mellifluous
solano;
the Caribbean’s
hurricane
(derived from the Taino word
huracan
, which means “evil spirit”); Sweden’s gale-level
frisk vind;
China’s whispering
I tien tien fung
, or first autumn breeze, the
sz
.

Storms have been fretting the coast here for days, and now thick gray clouds stagger across this sky. I watch mashed-potato heaps of cumulus (a word that means “pile”) and broad bands of stratus (which means “stretched out”). As author James Trefil once observed, a cloud is a sort of floating lake. When rising warm air collides with descending cold air, the water falls, as it does now. I take shelter on a porch, while a real toad-strangler starts, a full-blooded, hell-for-leather thunderstorm, during which the sky crackles and throbs. Lightning appears to plunge out of it, a pitchfork stabbing into the ground. In fact, it sends down a short electrical scout first, and the earth replies by arcing a long bolt up toward the sky, heating the air so fast that it explodes into a shock wave, or
thunder
, as we call it. Counting the seconds between a lightning flash and the thunder, I then divide by five, and get a rough idea of how far away it is—seven miles. In one second, sound travels 1,100 feet. If the lightning flash and the thunder arrive at the same time, one doesn’t have much of a chance to count. In a little while the
storm quiets, as the thunder bumpers roll farther up the coast. But some clouds still stalk the sky. A cloud rhinoceros metamorphoses into a profile of Eleanor Roosevelt; then a bowl of pumpkins; then a tongue-wagging dragon. Parading hugely across the sky, clouds like these have squatted above people of all times and countries. How many vacant afternoons people have passed watching the clouds drift by. The ancient Chinese amused themselves by finding shapes in the clouds just as Inuits, Bantus, and Pittsburghers do now. Sailors, generals, farmers, ranchers, and others have always consulted the crystal ball of the sky to foretell the weather (lens-shaped clouds—severe winds aloft; dappled or “mackerel” sky—rain is near; low, thick, dark, blanketlike clouds—a stormy cold front may be coming), devising jingles, maxims, and elaborate cloud charts and atlases, graphics as beautiful as they are useful. On a train through Siberia, Laurens van der Post looked out the window at the huge expanse of flat country and endless sky. “I thought I had never been to any place with so much sky and space around it,” he writes in
Journey into Russia
, and was especially startled by “the immense thunder clouds moving out of the dark towards the sleeping city resembling, in the spasmodic lightning, fabulous swans beating towards us on hissing wings of fire.” As van der Post watched the lightning from the train, the Russian friend accompanying him explained that they had a special word in his language for just that scene:
Zarnitsa
.

Throughout time and place, people have been obsessed with the many moods of the sky. Not just because their crops and journeys depended on the weather, but because the sky is such a powerful symbol. The sky that gods inhabit, the sky whose permanence we depend on and take for granted, as if it really were a solid, vaulted ceiling on which stars were painted, as our ancestors thought. The sky that can fall in nursery rhymes. In the nuclear disarmament marches of the sixties, some people wore signs that read:
CHICKEN LITTLE WAS RIGHT
. We picture the sky as the final resting place of those we love, as if their souls were perfumed aerosol. We bury them among pine needles and worms, but in our imaginations we give them a lighter-than-air journey into some recess of the sky from
which they will watch over us. “High” is where lofty sentiments dwell, where the “high and mighty” live, where choirs of angels sing. I don’t know why the sky symbolizes our finest ideals and motives, unless, lacking in self-confidence, we think our acts of mercy, generosity, and heroism are not intrinsic qualities, not characteristics human beings alone can muster, but temporary gifts from some otherworldly power situated in the sky. Stymied by events, or appalled by human nature, we sometimes roll our eyes upward, to where we believe our fate is dished out in the mansions of the stars.

Driving four hours south, along spectacular cliffs and a wild and dramatic ocean where sea otters bob in the kelp beds, sea lions bark, harbor seals clump together like small mountain ranges, and pelagic cormorants, sanderlings, murres, and other seabirds busily nest, I pause on a wind-ripped slope of Big Sur. A Monterey pine leans out over the Pacific, making a ledge for the sunset. The pummeling gales have strangled its twigs and branches on the upwind side, and it looks like a shaggy black finger pointing out to sea. People pull up in cars, get out, stand and stare. Nothing need be said. We all understand the visual nourishment we share. We nod to one another. The cottony blue sky and dark-blue sea meet at a line sharp as a razor’s edge. Why is it so thrilling to see a tree hold pieces of sky in its branches, and hear waves crash against a rocky shore, blowing spray high into the air, as the seagulls creak? Of the many ways to watch the sky, one of the most familiar is through the filigree limbs of a tree, or around and above trees; this has much to do with how we actually see and observe the sky. Trees conduct the eye from the ground up to the heavens, link the detailed temporariness of life with the bulging blue abstraction overhead. In Norse legend, the huge ash tree Yggdrasil, with its great arching limbs and three swarming roots, stretched high into the sky, holding the universe together, connecting earth to both heaven and hell. Mythical animals and demons dwelt in the tree; at one of its roots lay the well of Mimir, the source of all wisdom, from which the god Odin drank in order to become wise, even though it cost him the loss of an eye. We find trees offering us knowledge in many of the ancient stories and legends, perhaps because they alone seem to unite the earth and
the sky—the known, invadable world with everything that is beyond our grasp and our power.

Today the ocean pours darkly, with a white surf pounding over and over. Close to the shore, the thick white wave-spume looks applied by a palette knife. The damp, salty wind rustles like taffeta petticoats. One gull finds a shellfish and begins picking it apart, while the others fly after it and try to snatch the food away, all of them squeaking like badly oiled machinery.

When I was in Istanbul many years ago, I marveled at the way the onion-shaped mosques carved the sky between them. Instead of seeing a skyline, as one would in New York or San Francisco, one saw only the negative space between the swirling, swooping, spiraling minarets and bulbous domes. But here one sees the silhouette of distinctive trees against the sky: Scotch pine, which has a long stem with a roundish top resembling a child’s rattle; tall, even, rice-grain-shaped cypress and spruce. Farther north stand the sequoias, the heaviest living things to inhabit the planet. The talcy-leaved eucalyptus, nonnative trees that are so hardy and fast-growing they’ve taken over whole forests in California, look like bedraggled heads of freshly shampooed hair. In the fall and winter, one can find among their branches long garlands of monarch butterflies, hanging on by their feet, which have prongs like grappling hooks. Each year, a hundred million migrate as much as four thousand miles from the northern United States and Canada to overwinter on the California coast. They cluster to keep warm. Butterflies seem to prefer the oily mentholated groves, the fumes of which keep away most insects and birds. Blue jays occasionally attack the monarchs when they leave their garland to sip nectar or sit out in the open and spread their wings wide as solar collectors. Monarch larvae eat the leaves of milkweed, a poisonous, digitalislike plant, to which they are immune, but which makes
them
poisonous; and birds quickly learn that eating monarchs will make them sick. If you see a monarch flying around with a wedge-shaped piece of wing missing, you are most likely looking at a veteran of an uninformed bird’s attack. When I was helping to tag monarchs, I saw just such a female trembling on the porch floor outside my motel-room window. A huge blue jay in
a nasty temper perched on the porch rail, screeching and flapping, and getting ready to dive at the monarch again. Though I usually know better than to intrude in nature’s doings, my instincts took over and I rushed outside, lunged at the blue jay to punch it in the chest, just as it leapt up with a great squawk and flap, truly terrified by my sudden attack. The butterfly stood her ground and shook, and I picked her up carefully, checked to see if she were pregnant by pressing her abdomen gently between my thumb and forefinger, feeling for a hard pellet. She wasn’t, and the missing wedge of wing didn’t look too bad, so I carried her to the base of a tree, at the top of which swayed a long orange string of monarchs. Then I held her above my open mouth and breathed warm air over her body, to help heat her flying muscles since it was a chilly morning, and tossed her into the air. She fluttered right up to her cluster, and, as I walked back to my room, I saluted her. The blue jay was still shrieking bloody murder, and then I saw it fly out of the yard with strong, confident beats.