once blue is acquired, it eclipses green

When a name for a color is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When a name for a color is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, and, until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue. To name the color blue the Assyrians turned uknu, the noun for lapis lazuli, into an adjective. The Icelandic word for blue and black is the same, one word that fits sea, lava, and raven. Goethe's blue is the color of "enchanting nothingness."

-Ellen Meloy

the way light changes in september astounds me, and this year it's been a bright, crisp blue light with sharp-edged shadows like razor blades on the mountains. most of the last two weeks, the sky has been cloudless, the air still and, until recently, relatively warm, though the sun climbs less each day. i spent last week out in the park with c, and on wednesday i climbed most of the mountain usually enveloped in the grant creek wolf closure, south of the road. ice lined the creek at its base, and the tundra was encased in a thick, decisive frost that my feet punched through with a crunching sound until i reached the scree towards the top, frozen into unforgiving steep slopes. (it reminded me of "cinder sledding" on the volcanic mesa near our house in northern AZ as a kid, on days when enough snow fell in town to cancel school, but in the high desert where we lived, it was clear and dry and cold. with a self-righteous sense of recreational justice, i was determined, like my forest-dwelling classmates, to spend the day sledding (it occurs to me now that they were probably just watching TV). i brought my plastic sled up on the cinders, often frozen underneath, and in a sort of pathetic imitation of winter sports, scraped my way downward over bare cinder and rock. i remember ripping the knees of my favorite pair of purple stretch pants.)
i'd forgotten my sunglasses, and the sun obscured my view of the ridgeline above me. my knee hurt. a north wind had risen as i'd walked, and i found myself suddenly uncomfortable with the reduction of color to brown land, blue sky, and very little else. i sat down on a semi-horizontal semi-stable rock outcropping, turned away from the blinding sun peering over the summit, and ate a sandwich. a small group of sandhill cranes flew below me. and then i descended, not feeling defeated so much as abstractly uneasy with the way the sun shone on the mountains. "be careful," c had said as i left toklat on my bike, and i laughed at him, at the idea that i needed warnings about bears, wolves, clumsiness, cold wind. it was difficult to explain that i'd turned back mostly because i was overwhelmed by blue light.
the next day was windy and cold. we drove to wonder lake, and i mostly sat in the truck sketching leafless birch trees and watching for cranes overhead. there were whitecaps on the lake and all the roadside tundra ponds, and we watched the cranes circling, holding steadily in place as they beat their wings against the wind, and then would suddenly give up, abandon their formation, and float backwards with the wind. i was entranced with the apparent futility of it, with the choice, to the extent that migration is a choice, to fly on that particular day, and in this blue light. i fell asleep in the truck, blinded and overdressed, in a gravel pit.
in an essay in the sept. 13 issue of high country news, george sibley writes of the similarities and differences between humans and cranes, suggesting that, perhaps, both species have ceased to evolve, that we've maxed out at evolutionary adolescence:

So there is something that works, sort of--for cranes. I am Homo sapiens sapiens, thinking, thinking about how we might invest our big brains to help ourselves the way we are able to help the cranes. Well, my analogy just cracked, I think; I was about to say "the way we are able to help the cranes invest their big wings in a fundamentally incomprehensible (some might say ridiculous) transcontinental flight to breed in a cold place they won't stay in long before flying back..." Is the adult state of Homo sapiens sapiens going to be something like that? Something that--cranish? It's worked for the cranes for a long time. Does it matter that it's only beautiful?

when c looked at my pictures of those days, he asked about the color filter settings on my camera. but they were just blue days, pure blue. and there wasn't really any way to hide from that.