Grasping Vapor

When I was a little girl, I used to lie in the grass and stare at the sky, finding faces and animals and entire stories up there in the vaporous clouds. It’s a common childhood pastime, nothing unique, but I still love doing it all the same.

When I was in high school, I took a course on Astronomy, this time focusing on another kind of vaporous body in another kind of sky: the stars at night. Learning constellations and star names based on ancient civilizations’ own words for the shapes and faces and stories of the sky, was almost as exciting as coming up with my own.

What is it about the sky that draws me toward it? Its endless space? Its provision? Its possibilities? True, the mysteries of our own ocean floors outnumber the mysteries of outer space, but to this landlocked Pennsylvanian, the sky is an immediate reminder of all we still don’t know.

The sky, made of gasses and vapors; the clouds, water and dust; the stars, vaporous fire; and the planets and moons, reflections of light.

Although there are solids out there—the terra firma of certain planets, meteors, moons—most of outer space is just that: space. From the vapors of Earth’s atmosphere to the gasses of the Sun, most of what we see in the sky is made up of uncertainties. “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” sing Maria’s sisters in The Sound of Music. How do you hold a piece of the sky?

I wonder, if the sky and its clouds and stars and planets, were a character, what would the character be like? I once read a Snohomish story about humans and animals working together to push up the sky. In it, the sky wasn’t a character as much as a problem to be solved. Legends about the night sky call it a place, not a person. But what kind of person would it be?

I think the sky is unknowable, and despite our telescopes and rockets and space stations, the sky will always be a mysterious place, a place outside of us that is as inscrutable as the part of us that’s within. We can label the gaseous elements and trace the planets’ paths, but in the end, even naming something doesn’t mean we’ve figured it out.