Watching the Sky

Today, we’ve all been watching the sky. It’s a pale violet-white, uniformly cloud-covered. Winter storm season is rumored to have arrived in the Metro area, although the snowflakes have not yet begun to fall. While we wait, we occupy ourselves by contemplating the current cold drizzle and the predictions of gloomy meteorologists. The forecast is at the forefront of almost every discussion, whether it is in-depth (from a coworker: “Listen to the weather tomorrow, and you take as much time as you need to get here”) or superficial (from a barista: “I wouldn’t want to be out driving in this if it turns colder”). And when all the conversation on the topic has been exhausted, we go back to staring toward the horizon, where buildings meet the clouds.

I’ve never really scrutinized the relationship between skyline and sky before. You need to achieve distance to see the patterns that the varying heights of towers form, and before this fall, I could only step back far enough on occasion, when I traveled across the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston on a Red Line train. From my subway car seat, I could see the city stretch along the riverbanks, all old brick buildings and leafy green parks and metal and glass towers. I could see the sun reflecting from office windows and shimmering on the river. I could see illuminated roofs twinkle against an inky, starless backdrop. The sky wasn’t the important thing; it faded when confronted with a rush of city brightness, its natural points of light replaced with electric approximations.

But today, I have spent plenty of time considering the twin skylines. They’re not much to look at, in truth – two handfuls of buildings reach feebly heavenward. The great flat stretches of Midwest land render the closely-built towers of East Coast cities unnecessary. Instead of scraping the sky, buildings here only need to brush lightly against it, and because of this limited reach, towers and atmosphere interact. On chilly mornings, fog rolls in on the cold air, obscuring the tops of buildings not yet familiar to me. On stormy days, modest spires point upward into a depthless grey expanse. And on rainy evenings, the lights lining the tops of towers blur, forming red and gold halos that radiate through the night air. Here, the skyline accents the surrounding space instead of overshadowing it.

That’s the thing I’m learning to like about my cities’ modest skylines: when there are fewer buildings, it’s easier to watch the sky.