“They’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a nice day.’ Or, ‘The sky is blue.’ And I’d go, ‘But what’s up there? Give me some details.’ And no one could. Banalities, generalities, but no one was looking. So that’s the first step. The acknowledgement of the sky as something that’s just sitting there, omnipresent, it’s so goddamn obvious, no visitors’ centers required, but going unseen — that becomes almost a matter of fascination unto itself!”
He started researching. And lo, from art and literature, from the pages of history, they trooped softly forward: his fellow spirits, the quiet collegium of the sky-aware. It’s almost a tradition. There were the Transcendentalists, of course — New England’s pet mystics, permanently at an altitude. A cloud might have been more native to Emerson than a blackberry bush; Thoreau’s journal is full of brooding, connoisseurial sky watching. (August 2, 1852: “Varied dark and downy cumulus, fair-weather clouds, well-nigh covering the sky, with dark bases and white glowing fronts and brows.”)
There was the Victorian essayist John Ruskin, who regarded the sky as “the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works.” And there was Eric Sloane.
An author and artist of the Hudson River School, Sloane had his sky moment in 1925, as a 20-year-old itinerant sign painter in Taos, New Mexico: “The wind . . . haunted the high places like a hymn, and I felt as though I constantly walked in an atmospheric cathedral. The provocative landscape and overwhelming skyscapes stirred my emotion into a spiritual experience . . .” He became a mid-century sky evangelist — a proto-Borden, “pushing like hell,” in Jack’s words, “to have his fellow man look up at the sky.”
So Jack sought him out, in Kent, Connecticut. “He’s making money, he’s famous, he takes me out to lunch at this beautiful restaurant. God, it was magic. Anyway, I point to the next table and say, ‘Do you think we could turn that guy onto the sky?’ He says, ‘Ah . . . I wouldn’t try.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I dunno. Look at the guy. He just doesn’t seem like a prospect. When I started out with all of this, I was optimistic, but you can't legislate love, Jack. My suggestion to you would be: bail out now.’ ”
You can’t be cirrus
Bail out? Jack was just getting warmed up. He commissioned a study from the University of Arizona, with $15,000 of his own money, to investigate the dominant modes of sky perception and confirm his intuition that, as a culture, we are “essentially head-in-sphincter with regard to the sky.” He quit WBZ-TV and founded For Spacious Skies, registered it with the IRS as a nonprofit educational organization. He hooked up with some sky nuts at the National Park Service, and suddenly For Spacious Skies had an office on State Street, funded by the Department of the Interior, with a franking machine, a 1-800-number, and a gorgeous humming Xerox. From there he masterminded the First National Conference on the Sky, held in 1981 at the rim of the Grand Canyon. It was a wow — scientists presented papers, Native Americans danced, and the Arizona sky obliged with some magnificent “dipsy-doodles.” The conference got huge press — not all of it kind (“For Specious Skies” commented a Portland, Oregon, paper), but press is press. It was a time of hope. Jack and his crew were “bathed in euphoria.”
