Cloud Journal
Much travel in the last month. Flipping through my journal reveals the usual travel pieces:
weather and dreams. Here's some of the weather.
June 24th. Driving across Iowa, in the Missouri Valley now. Lovely cloudscape -- streaky high cumulostratus, seems white overhead and intense dove-blue at the horizon -- low small rain clouds beneath like patches of wet cotton, herds of them slowly grazing esat to west. The fields, -- so wet here! -- are as green as anything. The light brings out the green.
Terraced hills, good crops. Many calves, mostly black angus. These are the Loes hills, windblown dust from warm air blowing back onto the glacier. They are also found in China; Tielhard spent his life digging in them. I've been thinking of him so much.
June 28th. Driving across Iowa. High intense blue, a few feathered cirrus and on one horizon a herd of small soft cumulous. I love these hills, dappled soybeans, shining Van Gogh-brushstroke corn. Farms in their nests of trees.
June 29th. Driving east toward the Illinois border, 8AM. The sky gathers towards a point, long strokes of cirro-stratus. The sun just above the top of the windshield breaks everything into dazzle. Even the bowed backs of broad grasses are bright as green mirrors. You can hardly look at the white road.
June 30th. Michigan. We drove up to then under a line of thunderheads, blanked up pink and yellow, and sculpted as sherbert. They were less distinct from under, darker, purple. No rain on us but we drove into a place where it had just rained, the road dark and all the smells fresher and heavier. Later still, the yellow light slanting under the purple low clouds, a light as thick as painters' glaze, sepia, a light favouring the yellow in the wheat and even the cottonwood -- a more than real look: the yellow world, purple sky.
July 1st. Almost home. Dim enough now that the crops can be told only by their colour: the wheat, the yellow-green of soybeans, blue-green of corn, mysterious silvery oats. The full moon comes up through the smog-dimmed horizon, huge and salmon pink. Its bigness is an illusion but a convincing one. I hold a thumb up to prove it; can block the whole huge moon with a thumb. But it seems bigger than a city and we are driving straight into it, pink Oz. Fireworks.
July 18th: Wendy says she wants to paint clouds. If I could paint I would paint clouds. I write about them every day. I like Muir's journals. I will have my journals buried with me but it's no loss. They are boring.
July 19th: Coming on towards twilight. Skirting the horizon from south to west, a band of clouds. Darkish and distinct cumulous to the south, small, their flowering strung out side to side. But further west a huge upflung cirrus and cirrostratus veil, and under that piled cumulonimbus, bright white, a narrow-waisted stack climbing to the cold ceiling and beginning to flatten against it and blow. The rolling land is low-lying, a few horizon oaks quite black and wheat almost as bright as the white-purple clouds. They are pushing up now. Fast as tulips.
