I was anchored last night off Orcas Island in the San Juans, when the sky put forth a cloud show to match the beauty of any mountain- or ocean-scape I have ever seen.

            The clouds materialized overhead in varieties of shape and color: as multi-faceted as the images in a kaleidoscope, but far more expansive; as startling as the explosions in a fireworks show, but far more long-lasting.

            I stood on the deck of my boat, looking one way and then another. This cloud pageant did not simply enhance the horizon beside the setting sun. It extended overhead and away to the opposite horizon. As I beheld this beauty, I thought of the songs and poems that celebrate so many features of America’s grandeur: mountains, forests, and rivers. But I could not think of one that celebrates our clouds.

            I thought of the men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition viewing another heavenly exposition. At Fort Mandan during the winter on 1804-05, when the temperatures fell to minus 50 degrees, they watched and discussed the Northern Lights. They were so enchanted that they thought they heard music with the lights.

            Last night I could almost hear music in the clouds. Eyes alone could not do justice to the spectacle. 

            The view was worthy of a vacation destination. But where are the advertisements calling tourists to view cloud exhibitions?

            More so than a mountain or even the sea, clouds keep their own council. They do not linger. They form and dissipate and form again. They are not reliable, like Old Faithful. They come as a gift, not as a possession or a reliable tourist destination. They are evanescent.

            I think of Henry David Thoreau: “The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribably as the tints of morning or evening . It is a star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

            The images that follow show the beauty of the Orcas Island cloud festival of August  27, 2014. But don’t rush to Orcas to see this very display. It was transitory as it was beautiful. I am sorry, but you missed this performance.

            If you are fortunate, however, and alert, you may well see a similar cloud festival in a sky-theater near you!

            Here is how those clouds looked yesterday evening over the land at Orcas Island:

And here is how they looked overhead:

Mildred Aldrich
Image is from her book, The Edge of the War Zone.

     Mildred Aldrich, an elderly American expatriate in France, arose each morning at dawn during the summer of 1914, wrapped herself in a cloak, and went to her lawn to gaze over the French countryside. Each morning the sun illuminated the same lovely valley: “miles and miles of laughing country, little white towns just smiling in the early light, a thin strip of river here and there, dimpling and dancing, stretches of fields of all colors.”

For years Aldrich had lived in Paris as a theater critic for the New York Times. But age and declining health had changed her. She moved to the country to find “a quiet refuge” and “the simple life.” In retirement Aldrich liked to look over the countryside as she worked in her garden. Winding through the fields and villages, the Marne River made a “wonderful loop” to within a mile of her hilltop house. Aldrich’s American friends chided her for abandoning her native land, but even while cherishing the French countryside, she had not forgotten the United States. She reported: “I turn my eyes to the west often with a queer sort of amazed pride.” The United States was, however, a country for “the young, the energetic, and the ambitious.” Aldrich had once been all of those, but now she cherished the calm life of rural France.

"La Creste" -- Mildred Aldrich's House Overlooking the Marne River
Image from The Edge of the War Zone

From her dreamlike setting, the world itself seemed a kind of dream. One morning a paper arrived with the news that the crown prince of Austria had been assassinated in Sarajevo, Serbia -- then called "Servia." Considering the event from her hilltop, Aldrich reasoned that “Austria will not grieve much” because Archduke Franz Ferdinand was “none too popular” with his people.

If Mildred Aldrich had been an active political reporter rather than a retired drama critic, she might have sensed that the assassination in Sarajevo would not be so easily forgotten. Within a few weeks there were a series of threats, first by Austria against Serbia, then by Russia against Austria, then by the other major powers of Europe, including England and France, against each other. These threats, once acted upon, would drive Europe into World War I. And the first great battle of that war would soon take place along the Marne River, in the very countryside that Mildred Aldrich viewed with such serenity from her front yard.

     “It will be the bloodiest affair the world has ever seen...."

A few weeks after her first mention of Sarajevo, Aldrich was writing home, “It is a nasty outlook. We are simply holding our breaths here.” On July 30, 1914, she envisioned the looming combat: “It will be the bloodiest affair the world has ever seen—a war in the air, a war under the sea as well as on it, and carried out with the most effective manslaughtering machines ever used in battle.” 

A few days later a man walked up and down the road near her farmhouse beating a drum. He posted an announcement on a door at a neighbor's farm, and the village women along with Mildred Aldrich ran to read it. A "cold chill" ran down her spine when she saw that it was an order for mobilization. War had not yet been declared, but with armies mobilizing all across Europe she reasoned correctly that there would be no turning back.

On August 3, 1914, she wrote: "Well—war is declared. I passed a rather restless night. I fancy every one in France did. All night I heard a murmur of voices, such an unusual thing here. It simply meant that the town was awake and, the night being warm, every one was out of doors."

Marne River near Mildred Aldrich's "Hilltop"
Photo by Bill Youngs, 1986

Day after day airplanes flew over La Creste across the Marne River on their way to spy out German troop movements. At the beginning of the way, less than a decade into the age of flight, primitive planes were used mainly to gather information rather than to drop bombs or fire guns. Every day "groups of stern, silent men, accompanied by their women, and leading the children by the hand" walked on the little lane past her gate. "It has been so thrilling," she wrote, "that I find myself forgetting that it is tragic."

Mildred Aldrich was old enough to remember having seen men marching through the streets of Boston on their way to the Civil War about a half century before. Back then, "crowds of stay-at- homes, throngs of women and children lined the sidewalks, shouting deliriously, and waving handkerchiefs, inspired by the marching soldiers." Somehow things were different in France in 1914: " no marching soldiers, no flying flags, no bands of music. It is the rising up of a Nation as one man—all classes shoulder to shoulder, with but one idea—'Lift up your hearts, and long live France.'" Aldrich was deeply stirred by the site of men going to war, and of the women and children they left behind....

     "Papa, you know, he died on the battlefield."

The men that Mildred Aldrich knew in her tiny village went off to war with a mixture of patriotism and resignation. One came by her house before leaving and told her:

"Well, if I have the luck to come back—so much the better. If I don't, that will be all right. You can put a placque down below in the cemetery with 'Godot, Georges: Died for the country '; and when my boys grow up they can say to their comrades, 'Papa, you know, he died on the battlefield.' It will be a sort of distinction I am not likely to earn for them any other way."

A few weeks from now this blogger will travel to France to be in the Marne region on the one hundredth anniversary of the great battle that stopped the German advance toward Paris. In the mean time, I am planning to read and reread Mildred Aldrich's vivid a account of the opening of the war as experienced on her "hilltop on the Marne."

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