When I was a kid I remember the most beautiful blue skies. Sometimes there would be the puffy white clouds to accompany them, to accentuate, to embrace. Often there would be a breeze or a light wind, especially in the springtime and you would see the life of Skagit Valley, of the tulip fields, dance, to blue and white and red and yellow and green. In recent years I have come to believe that I am insane, because I remember the skies, and the puffy white clouds.
I remember the pickup trucks after the first few weeks of late spring or early summer, how caked the windshields were with bugs; all kinds of insects, flying creatures, dried remains of Earth’s natural bounty. Men, women, kids, would spend their time and energy at that gas station, washing those smashed corpses off the glass. Everywhere you walked in the spring and summer and through the fall was filled with life. The forests were noisy year round, even in winter. No one worried about gathering the debris from the forest to prevent fires, the little critters that were still alive, in the microbiome, did this for us. But I remember this, so I am probably crazy.
My dad was a logger, I worked for him up in the woods setting chokers during high school. We had fire season back in the 1980’s, this meant waking up at 2 AM to finish work by 11 AM. It never meant: it will be hard to breathe for several weeks. During the summer of 2018, when the SKY KING went mad, the air in western WA was hard to breathe for several weeks. The skies were brown and orange and ghastly. This was happening around the arctic circle, up and down the west coast from Alaska to Mexico. Whatever happened during the summer of 2018, it wasn’t “fire season”, it wasn’t because “humans didn’t clear out the brush”.
I remember the seashores of the Puget Sound during the summertime like rainbows underwater. So much life, so much variety of living things, so many colors.
I remember winters that were cooler FIRST, followed by autumns where you could see the death of life as a preparation for springs to come. Now winters unfold into micro-springs, and nature sings by accident or it dies. Am I mad or do I lie?
I remember food you ate that GAVE YOU the nutrition you needed, and the 5,000 additional supplements recommended by the guy on YOUTUBE was unnecessary. No “methylene blue”, no “bee pollen extract”, no “crushed bull testicle sauce”, just ordinary, natural, healthy food. And then there was Norman Borlaug’s “revolution”, and we made a shit ton of shitty food and added a whole bunch of humans to the planet. And we dumped a lot of top soil into the Gulf of Mexico. And it’s easy to see how we ratcheted ourselves up to a greater catastrophe than if Norman had never been born. It’s it weird that I can remember food before the nutrient famine: famine-famine comes next.
I remember when PERMAFROST meant PERMANENTLY FROZEN: not frozen for a couple years. Which means I remember when the word PERMANENT meant MORE THAN two years. I remember a professor in college defining PERMAFROST by using the example of a Russian scientist cutting off a chunk of frozen flesh and eating it despite being 12,000 years old. I know that something that is only “kinda frozen” for 12,000 years is only bones by the time the professor shows up. Weird how my insanity has created confusion around what permafrost is.
But it’s the blue sky thing, in the last decade, that throws me the most. It is so obvious, like yesterday, Port Angeles, WA, 4/14/25, about midday: look up into those godawful skies and note that what you are seeing is the work of man and not God. The work of Raytheon and other contractors, getting paid to make the weather “special”. How does anyone look up and simply say “contrails”, especially when no commercial flight path justifies this assumption. Maybe it’s, once again, because I’m batshit fucking crazy.
I am not asking the least political and scariest questions you can imagine. I ask these questions to students and teachers and random wanderers and it stops them in their tracks:
- can you describe a blue sky?
- when was the last time you saw a blue sky?
- where did the blue skies go?
Where did the blue skies go?
