Big Skies

My wife grew up in a moderately hilly landscape in Michigan.  When she first moved to a city on a flat, coastal plain, she missed the open vantage points that had been provided back home by the tops of hills.  And so, she found herself appreciating the freeway overpasses as substitutes. Nevertheless, the shortcomings she experienced in a flat terrain were offset by a payoff:  Being on a flat landscape made the sky seem exponentially larger.  And so, my wife immediately recognized the experience the 20th-century American author Willa Cather had described in one of her novels.  Of flat New Mexico, Cather wrote:  "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.... [T]he world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky."

Seeing the vaulting sky above a flat terrain is like viewing a movie on a wide screen in a movie theater, as contrasted with watching it on an old-fashioned, confined TV screen.  Although experts on movie history tell us that in the 1950's it was the need to compete with television that prompted the creation of CinemaScope and Panavision, I wonder if it was not also the popularity of westerns at that time.  Those wide-screen formats were perfect for depicting the grand open plains during U.S. frontier history.  Even though one 1952 western could not escape critics' pointing out its mediocre content, the movie's title recognized the power of the majestic ceiling above that open land on which the humans traveled.  The movie's title was simply "The Big Sky."

Not that a wide view of the sky is always delightful.  I remember as a kid road trips in the family car when a wide view of the sky revealed the vastness of storms developing on the horizon -- no way to steer around them!  As I remember that image of threatening skies, I also recall a part of U.S. history that most of those movie westerns barely mentioned.  Namely, that as European-Americans expanded outward and westward under a big sky, they confined native Americans to smaller and smaller pieces of land.

Our American love for wide, open spaces continued from frontier times even into the 20th century.  That love paralleled those 1950's westerns, as post-World War II suburbs sprawled out from cities more heavily on their western sides.  People still moving westward, still hungry for something.

Beneath the saga of U.S. history -- as told through the lens of our relationship to a big sky and a wide horizon -- lies, I think, a broader human desire.  It is the desire to feel that our lives are not constrained.  It is the desire to feel that the possibilities for life are so wide that they reach out to an unconfining horizon.  If that is so, what we might really need is not simply to look out across a greater distance, but to pause and look up more deeply into the sky, and into ourselves as we do so.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The sky is the daily bread of the eyes." If that is so, maybe what we need is not just a larger portion of sky but the habit of savoring it more deeply and more thoughtfully.

~~~

Whether your physical vantage point is confined or more open, are there any occasions during the day when you look at the sky?

(The Cather quote is from Death Comes for The Archbishop

 by Willa Cather, © 1927.  Book VII, Ch. 4.)

(The Emerson quote is from his Journals entry May 25, 1843, as quoted in

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, et al., ©1992.  68.44.)

(Stormy-sky photo by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos used under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Unported 3.0 license.)