blue

I know that school has started, some leaves have fallen, the symptoms of autumn are setting in.  Say what you will about the coming seasonal change; I have not yet raised the white flag to fall.  The abundant blue of Vancouver’s summer is not quite gone yet.  I will surrender when the blue does. Take Saturday, for example, all that turquoise, that azure, that cobalt, that sapphire; it’s indelicate, audacious, that blue.

The Howe Sound may in fact, by sheer virtue of it’s blueness, be my favorite body of water.  Peering out over the glacier-carved valley, I’m mesmerized by the steady advance of turquoise meltwater into the Sound’s salty Pacific blue.  The milky glacial water creeps out of the estuary, seeping down from Mount Garibaldi’s snowy crown, eventually pushing the bottomless Pacific out entirely.  From my perch at the top of a bald granite face, I see watercolor pigments, turquoise mingling with cerulean in visible currents. 

Though I’ve spent two years now in southwestern British Columbia, the landscape still makes me giddy, generating a kind of synesthesia where the cloudless sky tastes like chlorine, smells like spruce.  The bright air makes winter’s interminable gray haze a memory of a photograph I once saw somewhere. Summer is intoxicating, engendering immodesty with her showy chromatic displays.  Closing my eyes, I follow the waters to the Strait of Georgia, picturing their iridescent underworld split by steep vegetated islands.  I take a big hit of August air, willing my cheeks to flush, my head to reel under the legs of the late-afternoon sun.

If you flip through my closet or my flickr stream, you’ll find that blue is shamelessly overrepresented.  Blue determined which car I drive.  Blue chose my Halloween costume and picked out several pairs of my shoes.  Blue slathered itself all over my bedroom walls and all I could do was stand back and watch.

Oh, Blue, when there is nothing else, we’ll always have each other.  One day, I’ll write a poem, something Stevens-esque: Thirteen ways of looking at blue.  In the meantime, I’ll start with seven, and I’ll do it in pictures.

ps: Notable blue fact: Glacier ice absorbs the reds and yellows of the spectrum, but like liquid water, reflects the blues back out.  The deeper the snow, the more blue is scattered back acrosss the crystals and eventually crashing against our retinas.  It is a truly exquisite kind of blue.