Friend of mine calls me a nuts-and-berries guy.
This has nothing to do with my diet, though I do eat nuts and berries (along with pulled pork sandwiches and other nasty comestibles). It has to do with my fondness for hiking and, on occasion, sleeping in the woods.
The other day, my nuts-and-berries proclivities overcame my grade-papers-in-a-timely-manner tendencies, and out my office door I flew to ogle the clouds.
You might remember last Thursday. It started drizzly, turned rainy, and then, around mid-afternoon, I glanced up from my labors and saw a shaft of sunlight that I was powerless to resist.
When I got outside I saw that all the rain clouds had piled up on top of Mt. Nittany and Tussey Ridge, as if, like nuts-and-berries guys themselves, they had huffed and puffed their way to the summit and were pausing to admire the view before resuming their eastward trek.
I wanted an unobstructed view of them, so I walked to the northwest corner of campus and crossed Atherton to stroll the path along the golf course. Already, the clouds were pinkening, so I kept going, turning left on Corl Street, whence I had just the view I was looking for. (We nuts-and-berries guys love words like “whence.”)
A perfect hole had opened in the clouds and if I were even nuttier-and-berrier than I am, I would have said that this was a portal into another world.
When I got to the overpass on Corl Street, I turned back toward campus. At the end of the bike path is a little park for the children who live in graduate student housing. This may be the best sunset-watching spot for miles around, at least at this season of the year. So I stopped to enjoy the show, which only really begins when the sun drops below tree line.
To the east, the departing rain clouds darkened from pink to purple. To the west, a long, thin strip of cloud turned fiery. Four boys, 8-to-10 years old, were playing football, and, as boys that age tend to do, arguing after every play.
“That’s a touchback.”
The fiery cloud went from yellow to orange….
“You can’t do that.”
…to red.
“You stepped out of bounds.”
…to purple.
“That’s a penalty.”
Were any of them noticing the celestial spectacle? Probably not, I decided. Little boys are tactile creatures. If they can’t throw it, kick it, punch it, or eat it, they’re not all that interested in it.
I rarely take photos of sunsets, but this was a rare one, so I started snapping, knowing full well that the images would fail to do justice to the richness of the colors or the grand sweep of the heavens.
Then I heard the piping voice of one of the boys: “Look at the clouds!”
He said it again.
“Look at the clouds!”
That’s how stunning it was.
Later that same evening, I watched a third kind of cloud, as thin and wispy and white as milkweed floss, drift across the black sky.
“You know,” I declared in my nuttiest and berriest voice, “this planet’s got a lot going for it.”
And I reeled off some of its more dazzling attributes: clouds, sun, stars, moon, trees, blooms, seas, heights. (I like the way the English language honors the fundament with words of one syllable.)
Since Earth needn’t be anything more than habitable, I wondered if we were given beauty, or the appreciation of beauty, for the sole purpose of making us love the world, so that loving it, we would take good care of it.
God, the gods, the Force may have overdone it. So abundant were the world’s natural treasures that for a long time we humans thought them inexhaustible. The idea that the seas could one day be fishless, the plains de-bisoned, the forests shorn of their trees, was inconceivable. So fish, shoot, and log we did, greedily.
And now we’re in trouble. One of the things that has long worried me, nuts-and-berries guy that I am, is that electronic connectedness disconnects us from our immediate surroundings.
On a day like one we had during the first week of this month, when the falling leaves were doing the Snoopy dance and sky and trees were bluer and golder than a UCLA Bruins uniform, I had to stop myself from becoming a street-corner crazy and thundering at people to put away their phones and bask in the beauty that surrounds us.
Corollary to the above: If we do not love the world we may not act to save it.
That’s the trouble with us nuts-and-berries guys. At the slightest provocation – a sunset, a floating cloud, a falling leaf, a crashing wave — we turn into pantheistic versions of the Willard Preacher.
One of those tough jobs that somebody’s gotta do. And if not on Thanksgiving, when?
