Essays From Texas: Sky High

If you read my blog, you know I'm a huge fan of the sky. I love photographing the sky. It's one of God's creations that is absolutely mesmerizing to me.

It's different every hour. It changes constantly. Throw the sun in the mix, and you have an amazing sight.

Whenever I fly somewhere, I always head straight for a window seat. I usually don't spend the entire flight looking out the window, but I never get tired of looking out above the clouds.

On my last flight back to Lubbock from a trip home, the view out the window was no exception. It was a later flight, so the sky was in twilight. I don't have a picture of this, so you'll have depend on my mental image painting abilities here. There was a deep blue ribbon of sky sandwiched between two silky layers of cloud, that eventually gave way to white, puffy clouds frosted with golden color from the setting sun. Sounds pretty, huh? Too bad you can't see it.

Yesterday morning, I left Lubbock at 6:00am before the sun came up to head north back to XIT country in Dumas for a Monsanto Field Day (which, by the way, was the coolest field day I've ever been to...they gave away a four wheeler, two half circles of corn, three GPS units, some camp chairs and a bunch of other crap that I didn't win. I did, however, take home some cool caps.)

It was a cool morning that put the fever of fall into my bones. When I walked outside to get in my car, I could smell fall in the air. Each place has its own fall smell. Lubbock's smell is a sweet, crisp smell with a slight hint of feedlot. That sounds stinky, but it's not. I love that smell. It was 50 degrees in Lubbock and an even colder 46 degrees in Dumas, 180 miles north.

When the sun came up it looked as if it had set the prairie on fire. A burning orange glow bubbled up on the horizon. The sky remained mainly black, until the sun peaked a bit higher, turning it into a deep ocean blue sky.

I almost wrecked a couple times as I headed up I-27. I couldn't keep staring at the colors the sunrise was causing. I know this happens every morning, but it never fails to amuse me.

I finally had to pull over and let my photographic itch be scratched.

Even though it's a long drive to Dumas and points north of there where corn grows and FFA members meet, I still enjoy the drive. You can almost hear the theme music from Lonesome Dove playing as you drive down in the dips of the canyonesque (I just made up that word) landscape around the Canadian River. Oh, wait...maybe that was because I was playing the Lonesome Dove soundtrack.