The sky is about as universal an element as you could hope to find, an umbrella everyone shares. Unless you live in a cave, it’s part of your life. But it’s such a common experience that, like the furniture in your house, you might not always notice it. I had an assignment in the Wendell State Forest which, it goes without saying, is a bit wooded with a limited sight distance. But at one bend in the road the canopy suddenly opened into this view, a giant white feather coursing silently toward the southwest. Perhaps a thousand people saw it or maybe it passed without a glancing nod. The scale of the cloud was hard to grasp but it did appear to be flowing like a river, and made me think of two lines from the Joni Mitchell song of the same name: “I wish I had a river so long/ I would teach my feet to fly.”
Text and photo by Kevin Gutting