By 7 o’clock, the sculpted clouds had receded into a solid bank of them, a gray-white wall beginning at the rooftops’ edges in my neighborhood and ending at eternity. To the east, though, where the sun was rising, the sky was at least partially clear. The most beautiful light shone on the north-facing side of the long, low-slung building right across the street from my kitchen, on a wooden fence, on shingles, on the north side of chimneys and, most spectacularly, on the thousands of white blossoms that have recently appeared on massive black limbs that, by the height of summer, will canopy and shade a large portion of a yard and a lot of the intersection. I stood in the window, drinking my coffee, watching blossoms brightened by a sun that was rising stage left set against a mostly flat, gray skyscape.
To me, those few moments represent my favorite part of not spending 10 or more hours a week on a highway praying for your life, and more than 10 hours a week praying to substances that life, as you know it, will end. Lucky me, I thought as I stood there, watching.
I often talk about sky scenes, and just as often I am asked why I don’t take more pictures. Here’s why: I don’t own a camera. Plus, I’d hate to miss out on what’s happening right outside my window while horsing around with one. On Tuesday morning I poured myself another cup of coffee, and when I stepped back in front of the window – walked would be an exaggeration, because it’s only one step from the window to the coffee maker – one version of the sky had ended and another begun.
A couple hours later I stepped onto a bus and rode downtown to meet a friend for breakfast. The bus was cool and dark, like the changing room at the public pool where we used to take swimming lessons. By that time the clouds had moved on, and Northeast Portland was bright and clear, with sharp lines and contrasts so defined even those who had arrived in town five minutes earlier certainly recognized that this was the first burst of sunshine following many, many days of downpours, sog, hail storms, wind and general gloom. I don’t normally read on the bus because it tends to make me dizzy, but I’d grabbed an anthology of short stories that has been sitting on my table for a while as I was leaving the house. I took my seat, opened my book and began: “Because it had rained and the rain had caught the black soot of factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living.” I continued because, really, how could I not?
As the bus glided across the Burnside Bridge, as the buildings downtown shone like mirrors, and the deep green of the Hawthorne Bridge – two bridges to the south – actually glimmered, I sensed that something was deeply, terribly wrong. Even though white birds with gigantic wingspans patrolled the river, even though there were boats and other buses and trucks and cars and vans, all moving, all going somewhere, there was something ominous.
I recall a beautiful February morning when the earth shook with enough force that I thought my heart would fail. And I remember another beautiful morning one September when the earth shook, but for very different reasons. Those mornings had been so quiet, so ordinary, so sunny and orderly. I recalled them as the bus sat at the traffic light and the only sound I could hear was the hum of the engine and the sound – a whisper, really – of a city going about its morning. I closed my book and put it into my backpack and looked around the bus, nervously at first, wondering what sort of calamity was about to be set into motion.
And that’s when I realized what was so troubling: From Northeast 79th and Glisan all the way to Southwest 5th and Alder, I had been afforded the luxury of reading about a group of war correspondents in France as the bus I was riding made its way across the city beneath a clear, bright blue sky. What had caused my unease was not the presence of something but an absence: I hadn’t been subjected to a single cell phone conversation. And it’s been so long since I’ve had an experience in public free of that toxic racket that its absence caused me to assume the worst. And that, in turn, caused me to do something even more old-fashioned than conducting telephone calls in a private location: Shortly after I got off the bus, walking along the sidewalk, I made eye contact with others, smiled and even said “good morning” a couple of times.
