Until moving back here I had forgotten one of the very best things about the midwest: sunset. In fact, I will broaden that to include the sky at all times of day (and night). The sky is huge. I always used to think that the apparent bigness of the sky was due to the flatness of the terrain. I still think that is part of it, but I also think that the clouds are often at a much higher altitude and the layers provide a lot of vertical perspective. I often feel dwarfed by the sky in a way that I never felt in the Bay Area. In California, I was often stunned by the physical landscape — come around a bend on the road and catch a glimpse of the bay or of Mt. Tam or Mt. Diablo. Here, that is rare (for me anyway). The landscape is fairly consistent: mostly flat, mostly agricultural (which has its own beauty, but doesn’t usually cause one to gasp). The sky — as if to make up for the relatively sedate landscape — is totally out of control (or, “out of pocket,” as my former students might say). I frequently see clouds that make me gasp, and of course the weather itself is mercurial and violent.

Last night, driving back from Saint Peter to Courtland, I experienced one of the most awesome sunsets of my life. The western horizon had a strip of clear sky, brilliant red-gold with the sun already out of sight. The clouds above were fringed with crimson, and on its own this would have been a lovely scene. But then, marching toward us and fading into the blackness of the eastern horizon was the most tremendous roof of clouds. They were dark and angry, with bizarre whorls and striations, a different pattern in every direction. Flickers of lightning occasionally illuminated the gloomy landscape, but mostly it was dark and ominous — think Donnie Darko, or some cheesy meteorological thriller where sixteen tornadoes might descend from the sky at once. Behind us, the world was swallowed up in the stormy darkness and it seemed like we were fleeing into the gleaming west. Truly amazing.