For Spacious Skies begins with a vision. Literally. It began with the heavens pouring their intolerable magnificence into a man (Jack Borden) who lies defenseless as a babe. Thirty-one years later, he and I visit the spot, the site of divine irruption — a sloping field known as the Second Pasture, in the Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary in Princeton, Massachusetts. Waist-high milkweed rises around us, purple clusters on the dark-green stalks. Chickadees emit skeptical whistles at the meadow’s edge. It’s hot.
“The weather had been a bit inclement,” remembers Jack, “and now it had cleared up and there were clouds, okay? Cumulus clouds. So-called fair-weather cumulus clouds.”
A Monarch butterfly reels gauzily by, black veins in its illuminated wings: who would be so vulgar as to fly in a straight line?
“And I'm lying next to my wife, waking up from a nap, and — there it all was! Close, out-of-scale close, real close. It was so overwhelming it bordered on scary. It was like somebody hitting me, burning me, and jabbing me all at the same time. I looked at it for not longer than three seconds, and then I had to look away. And my wife said, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Jeez,’ I said, ‘I think — I think I just saw the SKY. For the first time!’ ”
No chemicals, Jack? Nothing in the system?
“A cup of coffee from Mister Donut. That’s it.”
Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, AD 36, blown off his horse by God-light: “Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.” Rousseau on the road to Vincennes, 1749, sucked into shining orders of superhuman truth: “I saw another universe and I became another man.” And Jack Borden on his back in Princeton, 1977, short-circuited by the firmament: “It just plain blew me away! This tremendous scene somewhere between majesty and frightfulness — it was as if the sky were saying, ‘Goddammit, if I couldn’t do anything to wake you up, maybe this’ll do it!’ ”
Mine eyes have seen the glory
So now he was awake — he’d seen the sky. What next? Because every believer knows, the thing about an epiphany is not what it does with you, but what you do with it. Jack, in the aftermath, in the rubble of his former consciousness, was exhilarated: “Now I was sky-aware! I was seeing the sun set over Sammy White’s bowling alley in Brighton, the whole self-renewing hippodromic canopy of it, with fronts coming in from the west — man, I had it knocked!”
And yet . . . this thing vouchsafed to him, it cannot remain private. It must not. Jack, by nature, is a communicator, an information aggregator, a bigmouth. Go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. . . In one of his spots for WBZ-TV he stopped people at random in the middle of Arlington and administered a brisk sky test — the camera peered over his shoulder, past the silver sideburns, as he shielded a woman’s eyes with a stern hand and demanded that she describe to him the sky above her.
