The Gift at Day’s End: -- Seattle Sunset
Look east!
Surprised windows multiply
a blinding sunset slanting below blackness!It’s gone!
Much of the year Seattle and the greater Puget Sound is not easy to see, coming in by airplane. The landing usually goes like this:
After sailing over the clouds and seeing glorious and giant shapes in the sky, including glimpses of Mt. Rainier with it’s snowy cap, and mountainous clouds, the airplane changes its tune — the hum goes to a different level — and the plane begins to drop into the moisture of thick grey clouds. Raindrops often speckle the windows as the speed lessens and, if you are like me, you always wonder how a pilot can cheerfully drive through this stuff with no visibility at all. You peek through that watery little window and hope he isn’t forgetting to look at his instruments.
The sound is muffled. We are in a deep fog bank. Where in this fog bank are we?
Then the frayed bottoms of clouds drag themselves away and there we are heading for the landing strip, often quite wet, and with grey silhouettes of hangars and roadways and the splayed out terminal I call home.
It’s almost always late in the day, since I usually arrive from the east to this western city. And I’m used to the rain after some forty years of it. In fact I sort of like it. But not because I don’t LOVE the sun.
But just before sunset we very often get a blaze of glory coming in from the west. The sun has found the little clear slot between the land and the cloud-cover and it slams onto the city and the foothills beyond giving everyone a few minutes of absolute wonder to gape at, or away from.
We feel like moles suddenly exposed to a million lumens!
Heading eastward, home from Seattle, on Interstate 90, I cross the 3-mile floating bridge across Lake Washington and another blazing landscape awaits. Big lakeside mansions reflect the lights off their patio windows, making it difficult to see the road in some places. With the right kind of glare one squints!
When you drive east at this time of day there is a blast of light from every west-facing window in houses and buildings of all sizes. It is glorious.
There is a ridge behind the Bellevue City grouping. That is the area I live in.
On a brilliant, clear day, one can see both Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges at once!! — one out the front and one out of the rear view window. I used to live on the foothills beyond — just a shadow against the darkening sky, in this photo. But my dining room window would be flooded with sunset at this time of day. A gift! Always!
Photos stock images, text by SGHolland©2017
