Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The great bowl of the sky ...

Montana has been known as "Big Sky Country" for decades, now ... and not without justification. As a result, the literature of the state is loaded with evocative descriptions of the quality of our sky. Here's one that I like, from the Larry McMurtry novel Lonesome Dove:
The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force -- it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white cloads floating in it like petals in a pond.

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