Climbing mountains you get high enough you can see above the cloud deck, the tips of the other peaks coming through, how the clouds look like soup from above, and in every direction just the land stretching out, no cities—like being on an airplane at cruising altitude, when everyone settles in.

The clouds were like that at the lake this morning, fanned out on a cutting board, the tree tops figurines from some child’s diorama, a group of ducks going under, coming up: an eagle on a high branch behind me I watched for a time from afar, sharpening its beak on the wood, picking for bugs.

And I crept up beneath it to listen to the sound it made but it stopped and sensed me, it tried to see me through the branches but couldn’t, it moved length by length down the end of the limb and bobbed there and I thought I should leave before I startled it but it left first: I watched it sail above the lake to the other side where it disappeared, and thought I should do the same.

Image from Wiki commons, Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.’

Categories: prose

Tags: Caspar David Friedrich, Climbing, clouds, creative nonfiction, eagles, pacific northwest, William Pearse writer