“The Scenic Route”

“The drive up to the city, along that Italian countryside highway unromantically known as “280,” was, as always, a delight. Weather conditions were unstable that day and I passed through at least three microclimates on the way there. At first, the sky being relatively cloud-free, the sun shone clearly. Few cars were on the road. I passed Crystal Springs and looked down at the trees rising up the flanks of the hills beyond the water. They looked like the earth’s stubble, as though it had lazily skipped a few days of shaving. The reservoir itself, like a jagged peninsula seen from a high-altitude airplane, had many facets. There were bays shaped like breasts and v-shaped inlets, and, on the near side by the highway, gently serpentine windings along a narrow strip of rocky soil that separated the water from the woods. As I advanced northward, the sky grew cloudy with low-slung cumulus tufts, beside which the sun blazed down. In mere moments, the aerial scene evolved: cumulus congestus, flat-based swollen masses of cloud, replaced the gentle, floating, drifting puffs; hypertrophy had set in, simple cloudlets now rushed upward as though injected with fast-acting inflationary gases. The congestus began to merge and block the sun so that it only vaguely shone through the nebular formations. Suddenly a blue-eyed peep hole opened up in the midst of the expansive, graying whiteness, a gentle reminder that the sky still existed behind the clouds.”