Water-Sky
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 at 3:32AM 
winter water-sky, good harbor beach, gloucester, mass.
The sky played tricks on me over the weekend. Maybe it was something to do with the long summer light on the days around the Solstice. Or something with the moisture content in the air. I don't know. Whatever it was, I could have sworn that the wild blue sea was just over that ridge of trees. Here in landlocked southwestern Pennsylvania, I spied water-sky.
It reminded me of this passage, from one of my essays in For All We Learned, The Sea (my manuscript in progress):
Stone, water, light. These are the sum parts of a seashore.
Certain curves of land and sky are known (to those who know such things) for their light. I’ve spent hours thinking about how to describe this light with words. It’s like describing true love. What creates this love, this love that infuses everything? Is it the sky? The sky covers everything. At the sea, the love flows down to your toes in the sand.
Light washes air. The air itself is a sheer, rarified color, the palest yellow and the most translucent blue. The air is transparent with light. So much here depends on this light that glazes everything. Every object stands in stark relief to everything else, painting a harmonious whole. Cerulean blue is the sea. Even the greys shine from within. Every scene is scrubbed clean and smoothed, then steeped in patina like an old Polaroid, faded or with sun-flare.People come to such places to paint, but the very idea makes me despair. Painting this light is as impossible as spelling it out in words. No medium is transparent and shining enough to recreate this air. Light everywhere is peculiar, wave and particle both. Seaside light in particular defies logic; it is both saturated and clear. Light is the invisible conundrum by which we see everything.
I used to think that God is light. Now I think that light is a god.
The sky is a holy spirit. She cannot keep a secret. She always gives away the presence of water. Even in the distance, even when I cannot see what lurks beneath, I can tell if water lies below. Look out into the distance, through a stand of trees or across a stretch of road. When you find an openness in the sky, a light that glows from below, you have found it. I call this water-sky.
I invented this phrase in Massachusetts before reading that the term already exists in Arctic climatology to describe a phenomenon that is the polar opposite of my definition. If you climb north, all the way to the imaginary circle at the top of the world, the underside of a cloud will look darker over open water than it does over land. This makes sense in the Arctic, where the black water absorbs more light than the bright white land. Being able to discern the appearance of Arctic water sky is helpful for navigation, say those who know such things, and I believe them. But I'm sticking with the latitudes I know and the water-sky I love.
Reader Comments (2)
"Light is the invisible conundrum by which we see everything."
"I used to think that God is light. Now I think that light is a god."
"The sky is a holy spirit. She cannot keep a secret."
You made me want to run to the lake and watch the light. I can feel it calling. Thank you.