Grey Skies

[This post is a few days late and a bit different — pictures and links to some of my posts about walking around Europe. Back to regularly scheduled programming next week].

It’s been grey and misting and cold for the last week in San Francisco - even more so than usual. Sometimes it feels like living under a shroud. Usually grey skies don’t have me feeling quite so morbid, so in an effort to elevate myself out of this “coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco” funk, I decided to force myself to write about the magic and majesty of grey skies.

Doing a walking fellowship in Northern Europe during the winter meant a lot of grey skies, but I rarely found them oppressive. And no grey sky was the same.

There was the grey of the Scottish Highlands after a snowstorm, where the the light grey of the sky seemed indistinguishable from the white of the hills, the whole world soft and muted.

The blurry grey of Western Scotland - not quite raining but a permanent mist hanging in the air. One day, I climbed up to an overlook over the Great Moss, the mudflats and the peat bog and the tidal marshes and the coast all coming together, smearing every shade of brown and grey across the landscape.

The Soviet grey of East Berlin, with its big ugly apartment towers and urban grime, broken up in the picture below by a colorful parade of Trabants, a touristy burst of GDR nostalgia.

While there was a certain charm to these flat blankets of grey skies, they could also get depressing after too many days in a row - unremitting and monotonous. I always welcomed the grey days that came with a hint of sun — the clouds became more dimensional, more bouncy. The sky was dynamic and changing.

Like in our little cottage in Tayvallich, Scotland, when the loch in front of us was still and perfectly reflected the sky, making the boats look like they were floating in the heavens.

Or a country lane in Wales after a fierce rainstorm, the sun finally bursting through the clouds ahead.

Or on the Camino de Santiago in rainy Galicia, where we scanned the skies carefully as we walked, wondering if we’d get to our albergue before the heavens opened up.

Often, the heavens did open up. I found it genuinely thrilling to hike through the rain (Andy was always bewildered by this attitude) but even I had my limits. After one particularly drenching stretch of days, even I was losing my enthusiasm. And that’s when the grey skies offered up a colorful gift — a reminder that if you want a rainbow, you’ve gotta put up with a little rain.