Clear Skies over Gaborone

One of the new experiences I've had living in Botswana is a rejuvenation of my personal relationship with the sky. As a child growing up in Vermont, I loved the sky. I loved clouds, the deep blue skies of summer, sunrises, sunsets, the stars at night. I had a small telescope and spent many cold nights on the roof of our house peering at Andromeda (M31), the Orion nebula (M42), or the Pleiades (M45).

During my life in Boston, my relationship with the sky became more detached. The sky was just there. You could not see long distances, the horizon was littered with concrete, glass, bricks, branches and leaves. Weather changed rapidly, so a glance at the sky would not suffice to predict how the sky would behave an hour hence. It had few stars that were bright enough to pierce the ever orange glow of sodium street lights. But most importantly, the sky belonged to others. It was cluttered with sky scrapers, entangled in telephone lines, flooded with searchlights, invaded by raucous helicopters, bisected by airplanes and littered with diesel, smog and contrails. The second one established an existential link to the sky, it would be shattered by the flashing lights of a jetliner or the obtrusive actions of a news helicopter.

In Botswana, the sky is huge and it belongs to everybody. There are few planes flying over Gaborone. I never see contrails. About once every two weeks or so, I may hear an airplane in the sky, or a helicopter. But generally, unless you are in the Jo-burg/Gaborone flight path, the noise generated by mankind in Gaborone comes from the ground, not the air. Even the hills of my home state of Vermont echo with the sounds of jet planes depositing contrails at 35,000 feet, carrying a fuselage of passengers from large cities on their way to other large cities, for the most part ignorant of the disturbance recognized by those far below.

Remember how eerie it was for so many of us, in those few days following Sept. 11, 2001, to not hear the racket of noise coming from the sky, to not see the silver bellies of jets, their icy contrails following like billowing streamers? That is my experience virtually every day in Botswana and I love it. I love the silence of the skies, which are pretty much the same here as they have been for millions of years; Stars, planets, moons, asteroids, and galaxies produce the only lights in the sky and birds, bats and insects are the only things that traverse it. Without the clutter and pollution of the sky, I am again enjoying nuances in the shades of lighting and the sunsets that I took for granted or ignored for years.