Contrails

Going out to feed the chickens yesterday, I glanced up to see that the sky had become a gigantic blackboard with long lines crisscrossing from one side of the horizon to the other.

Around 7:30 AM, numerous jets fly over the farm at high altitudes, flying mostly west. At 7:40AM I counted more than 10 at once. At no other time does this seem to happen.

Their icy contrails are like massive sculptures in the sky. Yet these huge forms decay and disappear within half an hour, leaving the eternal sky. The way these lines trace and form beautiful, or disturbing backgrounds to the prosaic scenery fascinates me. I feel awed by the immense power of the contrails, which are extremely large but very far away (30,000 feet up in the air or about five miles).

These absolutely straight lines seem at once foreign to a medium which is anything but linear or geometric, and made of it since being water vapor, contrails are literally clouds. They look pencil-drawn. One line made a scissors cross behind an electrical wire, forming double arrowheads that face each other. Surprising to see such geometry in the normally soft sky.

In one image, the sky is converted into a minimalist canvas, divided by a single severe stroke. I think about the speed of the jet, about 570 mph. That line races across the sky. Despite the formality of the composition, the line seems comical, like a series of cartoon exhaust puffs.

In a way these contrails are technological graffiti on a massive scale - aside from the unusual geometries involved, the sky also seemed marked and scarred by them. At a lower angle, the angle and size of the trails made it almost seem like the sky was falling into the edge of the horizon.

Over the barn, an explosion of lines placed alarming exclamation points, or perhaps an aerial Statue of Liberty crown, over the sturdy dowager building. I shot one frame without a contrail, as contrast to all this drama. And another, with a faint contrail faintly behind a tiny morning moon lurking behind the branches of a walnut tree.

More images at Contrails.