Perhaps I have a special eye for the sky because I grew up with parents who were pilots. I remember, from a very early age, looking up at passing airplanes and learning to distinguish which ones were my father returning from a trip. Even when there were no airplanes in the sky, we were always looking up there. My parents looked to the sky to get a sense of the coming weather and they taught us to identify different clouds and recognize how the upper atmosphere winds are not always going the same speed, or even the same direction as the surface winds.

My sister once had two dogs at the same time. The Labrador seemed to notice every small creature that was on the ground. She often identified and chased rabbits before we saw them. She paid attention to all of the little creatures such as mice and even some of the insects. The only time she was interested in birds was when they were on the ground. She took great delight in running into a flock of seagulls and sending them flying. But she could ignore them once they were airborne. She paid no attention to the crows who raised a ruckus in the trees. Even a squirrel which she loved to chase seemed to lose interest to her if it went too high in the tree. The Spaniel was some kind of a natural bird dog. She barked at every type of bird, including the swallows darting after mosquitoes in the evening. She seemed to be almost oblivious to a rabbit darting out from under a bush. At least she seldom gave chase. It was a chaos and a bit of fascination to walk those two dogs at the same time because one would pull at the leash in one direction, while the other was intent on different prey.

In that sense, I guess, I’m a bit more like the Spaniel than the Labrador. I’m always looking up. Yesterday a float plane made many trips across the sky. It must have been shuttling folks to a lodge somewhere on the southern end of the lake and the Interstate highway, perhaps near the town of Coeur d’Alene. Before I even saw the airplane, I knew what kind of plane it was, what engine it had and even that its propellor had two blades, all from the sound it made. I reported the details to someone with whom I was walking and received the comment, “You’re showing off.” I wasn’t. I just notice airplanes.

As someone who is always looking up, yesterday was a banner day. Because we are in the high country, surrounded by mountains that rise thousands of feet above our location, it takes a while for the sunlight to come into the valley. The sunset comes a bit earlier as well because the sun disappears beyond the mountains on the horizon. This is a big contrast to where we now live, because there we look out across the ocean, so there is nothing taller than we are where the sun disappears from view. So I have the sensation of the days being shorter here than they are at home because of the difference of the time of sundown.

I began my day by putting into the water in my canoe with plenty of light to see what I was doing but before the sun had appeared over the horizon. The lake was quiet and calm, and I was in no mood for vigorous exercise. Instead, I simply paddled slowly along the shoreline, looking at the sky and watching the reflections in the water. I carry a camera when I paddle, but I wasn’t thinking much about the camera. Instead, I focused on the sky and its reflection in the water.

I had a camp song in my head as I paddled.

“God has created a new day
Silver and green and gold.
Live that the sunset may find us
worthy God’s gifts to hold.”

Silver and green and gold were indeed dominant colors, despite the blue of the sky and the water. It doesn’t come through well in the photographs. I was just enjoying the experience too much to fiddle with camera settings and color balance and other details of photography.

In the evening, I saw the sunset through the trees and grabbed a camera before heading down to the lakeshore for campfire. The high country is experiencing another year of drought, so we gathered around a homemade flameless fire made of colored paper and electric candles because of the ban on all fires in this district. We didn’t need a fire for heat. The day had been plenty warm and we were grateful for the breeze blowing in from the lake. And we didn’t need the fire for a visual element in our gathering, either. The clouds on the horizon provided a brilliant reflective background for a glorious sunset.

Glorious is just the right word for the light show we were able to watch. As the seconds ticked by, the colors in the sky turned from pink to orange to purple. Once again, the camera does not do justice to what we were seeing with our eyes. Looking back at the pictures I did take, however, is a good reminder of the experience. It was one of those “you had to have been there” moments, but the pictures provide a bit of an index to the story as I think of it this morning.

If you read my journal yesterday, you might be interested to know that the visitor that was in the room as I wrote, has gone elsewhere. A few moments after dark last night with all of the lights on inside the room and all of the doors open to the dark outside and the bat was ready to return to the business of chasing mosquitoes in the night sky. We sat on the deck and watched others feeding on the flying insects that were invisible to us in the night sky. Even after dark, I was still looking up. I went to sleep dreaming of the beauty of spacious skies.

How lucky we are to be in this place and to behold such glory.