Out on my way west, I was gifted the view of a sunset over the plain. I woke up from an unsteady nap on my way to Chicago somewhere in west Ohio. Out the window at my right, at the perfect angle for me to see, was a setting sun, about 15 degrees above the horizon. My first thought was that of time - if we're moving west so that we're almost at Central Time, and considering it's early summer, what time might it be? I estimated 9PM EST, and kept looking. It was a complex, beautiful view, with long, smooth extenses of clouds across my whole vision angle, orderly square grids of grey, puffy backlit cloud balls, and sporadic loner clouds of many shapes, sizes, and densities. A tame white-yellow, sunlight barely began to refract through the horizon.
I saw grey clouds with the shape of a wide double-sided comb, and I focused on its shape, taking special emphasis on the shadows cast on its long teeth. I drew the shadows with a make-believe pencil on the pretend paper lay flat on the solid plastic table in front of me. How complex to draw a cloud to likeness, I thought - a volatile shape with innumerable wrinkles, and contrasts ranging from subtlest to drastic. I imagine the shapes they adopt fall into one of a small set of categories to the experienced drawer (not furniture), though.
Part of the sight's beauty was its expanse. The view was not limited to the sun's vicinity - several clouds that began there west stretched out to the east/north-east, and they joined two by two into smooth arcs, giving the impression of giant stationary Star-Trek-logo shaped skyships placidly resting in the sky. Or some immense futuristic evolved flying whale. A few strange ones seemed smaller and closer, faced the west instead, were stacked in a neat horizontal fashion, and each dragged a long smoky trail from their lower ends, which gave me the image of a pack of sky sea-horses heading east. Upon longer examination, I thought of them as a stack of side-flipped 2's, parading towards the east with heads held high.
I wondered at the making of these boomerang clouds, and I hypothesized a central stronger-current/higher-pressure system that pushed nice, puffy, ovoid-like clouds through the center, creating direction-aligned boomerangs following the wind. I could see smaller (looking) boomerangs that started and ended near the sun's direction, now colored a light yellow from above and gray below. Further east, boomerang clouds seemed longer and brighter - still painted a white hue. The position of all these clouds seemed impervious to the 70mph bus speed I rode at, so I wondered about the actual size of the things. I imagined that the similarly-pointy Star Destroyers, even the Executor, would be dwarfed in comparison.
When I turned my sight to the sun again, its colors had changed again - now a soft peach color closest to the horizon, yellow at low cloud level, and a faint hue of green above. A deeper twilight blue surrounded this colorful centerpiece, and it intensified the farther high and away from the sun I looked. And then I looked for the boomerangs, and I couldn't find them. Puzzled by the disappearance of such huge items, I turned back west to see two white straight trails of airplane smoke - the first underlining the sun going east, and the other bounding it to the west at an ~80 degree angle with the first. Their simultaneous extension out into the sky brought to my mind geometry exercises involving angles. The sky would make a great geometry canvas. The second trail suddenly turned to the east just before leaving my vision angle through the window, and curiously, flew parallel to the upper border of the bus window. The result was a remarkably fitting thin white inner frame for my scenery; a curious coincidence, and a nice touch to the already spectacular view.
The boomerang clouds reappeared soon enough, and I realized what had happened. They just changed appearance when the sun hit them directly from the side instead of from above, and if they were there, I could not recognize them. Now they were gray on top and lit on the bottom, and now I knew them again. The sun now touched the horizon, and its surrounding round space was lit red like a furnace, bright yellow farther away, and several farm houses on the way put in my mind a 19th-century warm hearth inside each one.
I saw grey clouds with the shape of a wide double-sided comb, and I focused on its shape, taking special emphasis on the shadows cast on its long teeth. I drew the shadows with a make-believe pencil on the pretend paper lay flat on the solid plastic table in front of me. How complex to draw a cloud to likeness, I thought - a volatile shape with innumerable wrinkles, and contrasts ranging from subtlest to drastic. I imagine the shapes they adopt fall into one of a small set of categories to the experienced drawer (not furniture), though.
Part of the sight's beauty was its expanse. The view was not limited to the sun's vicinity - several clouds that began there west stretched out to the east/north-east, and they joined two by two into smooth arcs, giving the impression of giant stationary Star-Trek-logo shaped skyships placidly resting in the sky. Or some immense futuristic evolved flying whale. A few strange ones seemed smaller and closer, faced the west instead, were stacked in a neat horizontal fashion, and each dragged a long smoky trail from their lower ends, which gave me the image of a pack of sky sea-horses heading east. Upon longer examination, I thought of them as a stack of side-flipped 2's, parading towards the east with heads held high.
I wondered at the making of these boomerang clouds, and I hypothesized a central stronger-current/higher-pressure system that pushed nice, puffy, ovoid-like clouds through the center, creating direction-aligned boomerangs following the wind. I could see smaller (looking) boomerangs that started and ended near the sun's direction, now colored a light yellow from above and gray below. Further east, boomerang clouds seemed longer and brighter - still painted a white hue. The position of all these clouds seemed impervious to the 70mph bus speed I rode at, so I wondered about the actual size of the things. I imagined that the similarly-pointy Star Destroyers, even the Executor, would be dwarfed in comparison.
When I turned my sight to the sun again, its colors had changed again - now a soft peach color closest to the horizon, yellow at low cloud level, and a faint hue of green above. A deeper twilight blue surrounded this colorful centerpiece, and it intensified the farther high and away from the sun I looked. And then I looked for the boomerangs, and I couldn't find them. Puzzled by the disappearance of such huge items, I turned back west to see two white straight trails of airplane smoke - the first underlining the sun going east, and the other bounding it to the west at an ~80 degree angle with the first. Their simultaneous extension out into the sky brought to my mind geometry exercises involving angles. The sky would make a great geometry canvas. The second trail suddenly turned to the east just before leaving my vision angle through the window, and curiously, flew parallel to the upper border of the bus window. The result was a remarkably fitting thin white inner frame for my scenery; a curious coincidence, and a nice touch to the already spectacular view.
The boomerang clouds reappeared soon enough, and I realized what had happened. They just changed appearance when the sun hit them directly from the side instead of from above, and if they were there, I could not recognize them. Now they were gray on top and lit on the bottom, and now I knew them again. The sun now touched the horizon, and its surrounding round space was lit red like a furnace, bright yellow farther away, and several farm houses on the way put in my mind a 19th-century warm hearth inside each one.
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