BLACKTOP DOCUMENTS |
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The bright cobalt ocean swells nicely with even movement. At the far edge of the panorama, the horizon line dividing water from sky pulsates with small distant ripples. The constant view will not hold still.
Opaque slate blue clouds forming a wall over the early morning horizon hover dark and thick for interminable tired minutes, then instantly their top edges glow. As the clouds separate into two horizontal layers, the rising orb of gold fire appears through the split. High splashes of thin clouds take on its solar color.
And the sea still churns out its rollers of rough midnight blue.
Clouds lit vehemently from behind to various darknesses of pearly gray take on the puffy forms of hovering weather.
The velvet dark expanse of ocean is broken only by a horizontal band of reflecting light pooled beneath the radiant clouds.
A low dark cloud mass densely blankets the sky, coating the air with excesssive humidity. A flash of quick lightning pierces the thickness, rain starts to fall, and then the low boom of thunder.
With the thunder comes the wind, and the velvet black ocean instantly converts into something else. The high winds of the line squall obliterate the waves, simply blowing them down. The surface of the water is now saturated with air and covered with frothing white caps, bubbling with wind. The wind through the water lightens its hue to fluorescent ultramarine, like it is lit from below.
Low pressure steely gray clouds hang suspended over an ocean of steady simultaneous color.
Sky and sea, in their matching cool tones, are divided only by a thin band of light warm gray sitting on the horizon.
The sun of a morning is midway up in a sky full of billowy clouds in various layers of whites and grays. Periodically the sun pokes through a hole in the clouds, behind which a spot of blue sky is revealed. Rays of sunlight down to the water are rendered visible in their refractions through the cloud mass. The angles of the rays together compose a radiating pattern, like the heavens of storybooks. This filtered sun illuminates the overlapping layers of clouds through which it passes, giving a thickness to the sky.
The rays that reach the ocean surface highlight the horizon in a shifting play of light. In this pattern of weather the water becomes lighter than the sky, and the world is reversed.
Sun lowers into ocean, a perfect orb cutting through a crystal clear pink sky. As it is disappearing into the blue floor of ocean, the golden sphere at the final moment gives way to bright vivid green. Green with no yellow, green hinting slightly toward blue, but mosly true green. This green tip lasts only a short happy moment, as the last sign of sun before it slips into water.
Ocean under this clear pink high pressure sky is rippled but flat. No swells, just even.
The night following green flash is starry beyond dreams, filigree layers of white specks on a black moonless sky. Bright white planets first, then major stars, then the distant pinprick dots of far light, then the white swath of milky way. All glisten unreally. By early morning the shower of shooting stars is constant, almost fading into the background phenomena of sky. Then suddenly, as these events always are, the southern sky glows brightly with a white ball of light flying crookedly down through the atmosphere, tailed by a red streak. This looks close. This is like a firewrok more beautiful than this girl has ever seen, only higher in the sky and brighter, and real. Six or seven breathless seconds later it burns out and disappers, and sky returns to its previous black and white carpet of stars.
Black sea underneath, except where it rushes past the sides of the boat. There in those borders sparkle phosphorescence to match the flickering of the shooting stars above.