A close encounter of the clouds kind

Yesterday evening, I had a close encounter of the clouds kind. It was 6:10 p.m. I was watching "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when I glanced out the window at the sky, and the sky drew me outside.

I was immediately overwhelmed, and I believe that was the intention. Everywhere, there was light and texture and color, in different levels of each, in all directions, north, east, south, west, and overhead, all angles, everywhere. It was a volume and dimension that could not be captured with a camera, and even if it could, there was no screen on which it could be meaningfully projected.

There are times like this when I wish my brain came with a jpeg feature, so I could capture an image I could project in my brain later in its full scope, without trusting memory. A short video would be nice. Instead, I have to convert memory to words, which seems futile when I'm standing beneath the indescribable.

The sky was a horizon-to-horizon inverted, sky-blue bowl, and filling the bowl was clear air, a see-through medium, but still a medium, like colorless coffee, and in this medium the cloud artisans created their work, according to their schools. The low-cloud school had created elongated sky creatures, white with gray bellies. The middle-level school had created gentle, opaque, sheaths of an impossibly high thread count. The high-cloud school had created barely existing, rhythmic strands, so fine they might have been the middle-level clouds with their edges turned to me.

Across the colorless coffee, north to south, a Mexico-bound airliner had slashed a high-level white, diffusing line, the way a food artisan would slash a dot of heavy cream in a white line across a mug of cappuccino, then let the surface tension both diffuse the line and hold it together.

I watched this for 10 minutes, turning and craning, turning and craning. Imagine being in a dream where you are standing in a hall, looking at the Mona Lisa, 15 feet in front of you, then turning to see the David, 15 feet behind you, and both are fading and will have disappeared forever inside of an hour. Which one do you watch?

That may be why the indescribable can't be possessed. If it could, it wouldn't be indescribable. There seems to be a time limit that I am allowed. For me, it is about 10 minutes. I went back inside to "Close Encounters," keeping the sky in one eye through the windows, going out again twice for short reconnoiters before it got too dark.

Then in the darkening west came brilliant crimson on coastal clouds. I went out to watch for awhile, watching this metaphorical end-of-life thing bleeding its crimson steadily out of the clouds into the darkness of night with every tick of time's heart. Inside, looking in through the window, the mother ship of "Close Encounters" was hovering on the screen. Inventive boys with Tinker Toys. Outside, the masters were finishing their commission, laying to rest another unique 24 hours.