A Column of Air and Rain

In which our Hero sweeps by a moment of a monument that wasn’t there

Summer fades and the mornings that were still tinged with dawn gold are now more consistently cloudy and dim. The warming green ambience of leaf and grass are fallen and faded. The ground is frequently wet from the rain of the night before. The summer smells have been washed away. The air is cool.

Monday, yesterday, the October morning was gloaming dark, eerie after the one-day Sunday sunnyday summer just a night away. Dangerous dark, like eyes had failed, or a massive thunderstorm was overhead or like the sun itself had gone out in the heavens and the sky knew it eight seconds early. Faded and dim, like the main a photo where the flash hit a doorframe and everybody and everything are ghosts of themselves haunting the darkness with pale eyes glowing with the reflection of the little light that remains.

An hour so strange in a morning like few I’ve experienced, ante-diluvian and strange. Dinosaurs and demons would have neither seemed out of place, and I stood in the barely lit dim with my barely clouding breath failing to stir the lifeless air, as silent students and wondering workers shuffled by, backpacked, briefcased zombies waiting for a walken war-cry.

And I waited.

And the world grew no brighter and no darker but changed luminescence and saturation. The dawn grew brighter and the clouds grew heavier and the ghosts of rain had begun to fall on this ghostly world, as my ride arrived, at the appointed hour that time seemed to disdain.

Thus I go to my work.

The Megacity is vast, and sprawling, without constraints like islands or mountains to contain it. But the sprawl leaves room for trees, and despite the fight for more and more land, the city is fractured by river valleys that carve their way between the streets, between the houses. In the midst of the concrete and steel are these swaths of Wild.

My route to work takes me through one of the fissures of uncity, a few blocks worth of the absence of blocks, with a vault of trees on either side. And in the crack in civilization, under the dimmed grey sky, I saw a column of hawks a-wheel, like the teeth of invisible gears turning in a massive column of elegant predators. Not less than a dozen, and my guess is twenty or even more. Where I’ve seen perhaps 5 of them in my life before this time.

It was to the north of the road, like a scene from a movie. Somewhere, just beyond the trees, something was happening. If they had been vultures, I’d have guessed that a battle had ended. But these were gathered hunters, and my mind scrabbling for reasons real and fantastic keeps sliding to the idea that I’m inadvertently witnessing the emergence of a genius loci. Like the God of the Mountain and the God of the Waters, I’ve had a moment to catch a God of the Woods, born or dying under the embers of clouded dawn.

The physical presence of the column was astounding, as it did the slow parallaxian pirouette that reality does as you drive by it. The quality of the light, the mystery of the day was answered by it. And I don’t believe in any of those gods in potentia but the awe is still there. The feeling is still there.

I want to remember that.