Accumulations of Blue
I’m back in New York City now, musing on my final map and all the blues I saw in Alaska. The most beautiful blues of course were not manufactured. They were the startling ones, the glimmer of the magpie wing, a gift of berries, my fingers stained with stamp ink as I press the rubber onto white, white paper. The sky is spectacular ink. Now, in the city, the blues don’t seem as luminous as they did in Anchorage. They don’t shimmer and pulse the same way they did in Alaska. Here my vision of the sky is cluttered by skyscrapers rather than treetops. I like to imagine the buildings are gathering bits of sky on their upper floors, as their name might suggest.
I look at the grid of blue sky I gathered from Alaska and think maybe, in spite of my small stature, I was playing the part of a skyscraper while I was in Anchorage. My neck arched upward, peering at the bed of blue. I cut the sky into small cubes, pieces of time portioned out. The clouds peek in, curtains that obstruct the blue, filter and transform it. Blue is the color of accumulating time, time passing, time fading and stacking.
Every Blue I Saw
blue eyes
blue shadows
blue eye shadow
blue postal uniform
blue balloon
blueberries
my blue-stained fingers
blue magpie wing
blue knit hat
blue duct tape
blue thread
blue pencil sharpener
blue inkpad
blue cracker package
blue retractable dog leash
blue sleeping bag
blue shed
blue cars
blue sandal straps
blue boxtop
blue bottle caps
blue pencil case
blue shorts
blue warning sign
blue bandana
blue railings
blue Snapple lid
blue quilt
blue canoe straps
blue fence
blue inflatable kayak
blue cardboard box
blue portapotty water
blue glass earrings
blue gazebo frame
blue hat buttons
blue barrette
blue trash dumpster
blue bathroom door
blue sweater
blue jeans
blue checked plaid
blue fleece
blue water bottle
blue pencil
blue vest
blue paint container
blue pompom
blue sweatshirt
blue coat
blue hat lettering
blue vehicles
blue bike
blue hat
blue thread on patch
blue t-shirt
blue dress
blue swing set
blue jungle gym
blue zip lock bag
blue signs
blue bike helmet
blue purse
blue baseball cap
blue socks
blue label on charcoal bag
blue label on water bottle
blue wrap
blue tattoo ink
blue sneakers
blue chalk
blue Budweiser label
blue playing card scrap
blue bike
blue chambray shirt
blue sunscreen can
sky
water
Losing Blue
As we move farther along the trail, it becomes more forested and blues are few. I bike along the trail and through culverts; the corrugated metal tunnels make me feel like I am inside a whale’s throat. I pass into an esophagus and become temporarily blind as the darkness abruptly swallows me. My eyes see like a maladjusted camera that takes backlit pictures and only the echoes of other trail users serve to steer me from trampling them. Just as quickly as I entered the throat I’m released into the winding trail. Here, the green of the woods overwhelms blue and I’m left only with glimpses of the latter: a flash of a cyclist’s navy sweatshirt, a corner of a blue tarp from a camp of someone who lives along the trail, and the ribbon of the creek as it carves its way alongside the path.
A few years ago, I heard a Radiolab episode about color, which told the story of William Gladstone, an academic who analyzed Homer’s writing and found some rather peculiar uses of color. Sheep were violet, the sea was “wine-dark,” red was used frequently, and there was not one mention of blue. After conducting further research, he found that this absence of blue held up throughout ancient texts across cultures (including the bible) and other colors were only gradually put to use later. He eventually concluded that in Homeric times humans perceived primarily black, white and red. Slowly, later generations gained the ability to see the rest of the spectrum of color.
As I move deeper into the woods, I pause for a morning alongside a turn in the creek and ruminate on Homer. The water starts to appear differently to my eye. The skin of the stream ripples with the colors of its surroundings and beneath that superficial skin is an inky substance. After being attuned to blue in a single-minded way since the start of our hike, the creek is no longer blue to my eyes. The sky, however, is unceasing. No matter how little of it I can see through the canopy and clouds, the sky will continue to be deep, penetrating blue.
Sky Scales
I recently read of a Swiss physicist named Horace Benedict de Saussure who, living in the 1700s, wanted to measure the intensity of blue in the sky. He created the cyanometer, a round dial that had 53 shades of blue, moving from white through a range of blue to black. I find this to be at once beautiful and troubling. […]
