I picked a particularly wet winter to move here to the Bay Area, and I have to admit that I’ve been vaguely disheartened a couple of times during unbroken week-long onslaughts of rain. I thought I’d left this kind of thing in London!

The main reason that wet weather is disheartening here, though, is that California is truly breathtaking when the skies clear and the sun shines down.

London is kind of grimy like a well-worn, well-loved overcoat. I don’t think I could truly state my affection for the city without becoming near-pornographic, but after 8 years it was definitely time for a change. I’ve only come to believe that more strongly since I moved.

One of the things I often lamented in the city was the sheer lack of sky. There’s nowhere inside the M25 - even the larger parks - where you can truly sit back and marvel at the enormous expanse above you. The sky is trapped, always fenced in by the false horizon of the built environment. I remember once visiting a friend in Devon and standing looking in awe at Dartmoor stretching away before us. “Wow. You have horizons here” was all I could mumble.

The stars, too, become strangers, lost for the most part in an orange soda-light wash which spills over London’s geographical boundaries tainting the sky for miles around.

A sunny Bay Area day, in contrast to London, is almost painfully colourful. It’s probably at its most beautiful right now - lawns and trees haven’t yet been subjected to the cruel thirsts of summer, and everywhere you look there are stunning patches of green. Everything else just sparkles in a weirdly pure light. “It looks just like the movies” is a ridiculous, redundant thing to say.

Dusk, though, is a purely magical time for me. I’ve started trying to leave work at the exact correct time (about 6:10pm at present) in order to drink it in on my drive home.

The sky, darkening at the edges, fades into pure blue above you. Until the sun disappears behind the bold wrinkles of the hills it casts a golden glow and endless shadows everywhere. It’s the sort of thing that makes a photographer weep with joy.

(Those hills, too, awaken the excited Geography student in me. I’ve never spent time before in a place which demonstrates the unimaginable power of plate tectonics, literally crumpling the ground like an enormous sheet of paper. Of course, there’s the risk of earthquakes associated with that too, but that’s life. Anyway, I digress…)

If my timing is perfect, then just as I near home the sky will be getting dark enough that the moon and the brighter stars, in just a few minutes, cast themselves across the sky. Orion, a constellation I’ve always been able to pick out instantly, rests between the trees outside my apartment’s balcony, and I always stop for a moment to say hello.

And with that, there’s a powerful link back to the home I left. It may be 5,372 miles away, but we’re all looking at the same stars.

Even if some of us suffer more orange haze than others.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 7:41 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: 5371 Miles, Thinking.
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