Dark sun rising

I left work at sunset today. This is something of a rarity for me lately, and I was fortunate that the sky was relatively clear - but not too clear.

I am easily turned around, and have a hard time determining north-south-east-west orientation without checking the position of the sun with respect to the time of day (or checking the constellations at night, the more obvious of which tend to cluster in the north and the south, at least as seen from my latitude.) It has taken me much of the past two years of working in my current location to determine what direction I am facing when I am coming in and when I am going out.

As I walked out of our plant's rear entrance this evening I looked at the setting sun reflecting off the cars in the parking lot, the ragged clouds scattered across the sky, and the rays of darkness seeming to emanate from a dark sun rising in the East.

Crepuscular rays, I thought. Shadows of clouds that have interrupted the light of the rising or setting sun. We often see sunbeams shining into the sky, or down toward the ground, but under very special circumstances - a critical density of clouds above the observer - these rays will manage to stretch clear across the observer's sky, appearing to diverge from where the clouds interrupt the sunlight and appearing to converge at a point directly opposite the sun.

The first time I saw this phenomenon was early in the two years I spent in Newark, Delaware, possibly during the single semester that I was enrolled in graduate school. I was riding my bicycle to the laundromat, a week's worth of dirty clothing strapped to my back in an Army surplus backpack*. I was riding north-by-northwest along a bicycle path and looked out at the setting sun, and saw the dark rays that seemed to extend from it. My eyes followed these rays across the sky to the opposite horizon, which is quite a trick when you're riding a bike downhill with a week's unwashed laundry on your back. And then I noticed...

The striped sky was full of birds. Literally full of birds, reaching out to the visible horizon in every direction. All sorts and sizes of birds. I had gotten used to the daily migrations of what I was told were Grackles, which flew in ribbon-like flocks that often stretched seemingly from horizon to horizon, but were only about a dozen birds thick. This was something different. The birds were not all of the same size or species, and based on my limited knowledge of ornithology, it looked like predator and prey birds were flying nearly side-by-side, although every bird seemed to maintain a healthy distance from its neighbors. The birds were spread out to the extent that if you briefly looked at a small part of the sky you might not notice anything unusual; you might, at first glance, think that you were just looking at a dozen or so birds flying from southeast to northwest across the sky. It was only if you swept your eyes across the sky, as I had when following the dark rays from the sun to the opposite horizon, that you could take in the whole spectacle.

I watched for a minute or so, thinking What the hell is this? After a while I realized I was not about to figure out what was going on, I was not going to see a fierce raptor swoop down on a little tiny insectivore, and I was not going to get my laundry done by staring at birds in the sky.

I moved on. The birds passed, the sun set, my laundry got done.

I never again saw anything like the vast convocation of birds that I saw that day. I still wonder about what brought it on.

Nothing quite so dramatic accompanied today's spectacle. Some people might see a dark sun rising as a bad omen, particularly one viewed three hours prior to the final Presidential debate. But it was a beautiful and remarkable thing, and I was glad that the events of today conspired in such a way that I was there to see it.

*I believe this memory is faulty, that I didn't have that particular backpack until I had been in Delaware for about six months. But I don't remember what I used prior to the Army backpack to lug laundry and groceries. Let's just pretend it was the Army backpack and move on.