The High Harsh Light Of August

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.  The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot.  It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.  Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone.”

Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee.

Emily Dickinson, To See The Summer Sky

This week seems to have been reserved for driving.  We drove for pleasure on Tuesday to a small town several miles north of the Farm, and yesterday we drove all over the Seattle area running errands and seeking pleasure.  All of our travels were accomplished under the high, harsh light of an August sun.

An August sun is pitiless.  At noon, it shines down in straight lines, highlighting every detail with equal disdain for beauty or disfigurement, its power of diminishment potent and searing.  It revels in itself: its narcissism is complete and unabashed; the notion that earthly sights might seem its equal beyond its comprehension.  It leaves an after-glare that stays with anyone bathed in its full light until well after comforting shadows have been achieved.

Long straight highways are its natural hunting grounds, for there is nothing there to impede its work from wherever you find yourself to as far as you can see from there; and if temperatures are hot enough, the horizons themselves are denied in shimmer.  There the sunlight glares and sears, raining straight down only to bounce off every reflective surface – glass, plastic, or metal, whether stationary or mobile – at impossible angles unknown to science or pure mathematics.  Trees and brush are anathema to highway designers; they must have worshipped the sun to have cleared them away from the product of their work so relentlessly.

I much prefer to travel country lanes in August.  Each of our travels begins and ends there; they sandwich the merciless coruscation.  On a country lane the sunlight is a milder, more approachable god: filtered by the leaves, it dapples the ground with the patterns of their sun worship, its ego leavened by the balm of shadow.   Here its power is in silhouette, and its silhouette is finery and lace.

About Gavin Stevens

Humptulips County is the wholly fictional on-line residence of Stephen Ellis, a would-be writer, an avid fan of William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County, and a retired lawyer.
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