Look Up

I’d like to ask you: who owns the sky? The sky cannot answer for itself tonight, for it is very very busy. Looking up from my perch at the ferry rail, I see a flock of starlings weaving themselves into and out of tangled knots of wing and beak in perfect accord, not one feather out of sync. A little above them hovers a blimp, here to spy on the BCS National Championship. A little to the south of this bright blue behemoth and blip of birdies a helicopter skitters past my line of vision, slicing and dicing the air on its way to somewhere important. And even higher above this fray three planes leave white wisps in their wake. Finally, Paul the pelican swoops in front of me. I hope there is some sort of treaty agreement among those who use the sky tonight. What must the birds think of all of these flying hunks of metal hanging in their territory?

In the desert, you can look up and see nothing but blue. Try it sometime. Lay on the ground and roll your eyes to either side, all the way up, then back down again and you will see only a blank blue palette for the clouds to paint. Take a deep breath and you will smell the earth.

Do the same in a city and you will likely see a building or three, a plane, a billboard.. Breathe deeply and you will most likely get a lung-full of exhaust fumes. It’s overwhelming

Nowadays we have to run far away from a city to even get a glimpse of nature, to not have our entire line of sight filled with advertisements for laundry detergent or candy bars. And god forbid you ask for a little peace and quiet in a city. Sirens, car stereos, horns and on and on until the very concept of silence is foreign to most of us, and makes us nervous to even think about.

I read this essay not long ago on Orion Magazine’s website about how hard it is to find even one square inch of silence in the modern world. I can’t stop thinking about the essay, not only because it is so beautifully written but because I am astounded just thinking about the lengths we go to nowadays to experience the things that are our natural birthright. As the author says, the air is owned by all of us. We all have a right to enjoy it and a responsibility to care for it. Same goes for water, by the by. All that blue sky belongs to you and me and we’ve filled it with junk. Somehow over time we’ve come to accept that the places we live and breathe will be filled with noise and billboards and concrete, and that nature is a faraway place we can escape to when we need to “get away from it all”. But at what point did, say, Alaska Airlines’ right (you gotta read the essay to get this point) to fly over a protected wilderness area automatically trump my right to enjoy a little peace and quiet?

We’ve got to stop acting like nature is someplace apart from where we live and breathe and start exercising our right to demand a patch of blue every now and again, even on the eve of the BCS football game. Take the blimps and leave me the birdies.