I’LL WAGER I LIVE OUT WEST because of clouds. Truly, my heart leaps up when I behold. There’s a billion miles of Big Wide Open to gambol in that never feels cluttered. Even when this vast dominating space is blank, I feel it’s just one grumble shy from rarin’ to go. The sky will explode at any minute. Up here in Taos that tension is endemic.
At times, I lead a chaotic life, full of theater and emotion. The air over this valley properly reflects my diatribes. But what can a writer like me say about clouds that isn’t a hackneyed stereotype, or reminiscent of the lyrical words on a best-selling record by Judy Collins? Not much. They’re fluffy and fleecy, big and booming, utterly diaphanous, charmingly puffy—
Excuse me, but um gee—y’know? It’s like calling dogs Spot and Fido and Rover, cows Bossy, and cats Puss Puss or Garfield. Doesn’t matter, though, does it? Let’s exempt atmospheric verities from a demand for original rhetoric. So: Each day, each hour, clouds reinvent the sky, serene as silk, big as hippos, loud as choo-choo trains. Their Greatest Show On Earth can create a brand-new postcard shot faster than I can whistle for help backwards.
Clouds frighten, then enlighten.
They kill people with lightning and floods and freezing shadows in January. They also soothe my soul, causing me to catch my breath and think of J.M.W Toner or Georgia O’Keeffe or Maxfield Parrish. They make me want to lie in a hammock and float indulgently, more lazy than a dandelion, more placid than a sheep.
I climb Tres Orejas Mountain in the middle of our sagebrush plain. There’s a rock shaped like a half shell on top of the southernmost peak. There lie I, a humanoid embryo curled into a basalt egg, staring straight up past the drifting buzzards toward some vast Theory of Relativity, azure-colored and without a single bit of vapor marring its “perfection.”
Has to be pretty windy up there, however. For suddenly a blink of white appears out of nowhere, and like a magician’s handkerchief, that raggedy cloud unfolds in size a dozen times over in the shake of an icy invisible wrist. Whoa, boy! Check out that albino blast of vapor growing so huge in shape it ultimately casts a shadow that actually makes me shiver. Then just as abruptly it evaporates, sucked back into a bright blue hole with hardly a protesting quiver: poof.
For years I have photographed clouds in all their splendor, bombarded by sunshine, glorious or inane. They are always eagerly willing—like enormous slavering puppies forged of cotton candy—to cater to my sense of melodrama.
“Money in the bank!” the mercenary moi cries gleefully every time those big vapor bozos go bonkers in cliché spasms almost too rococo to record on Kodachrome. And I reach for my camera, pointing the lens at heaven.
