Blue Moonity
By Michael H. Kew
Elevation is separation. Closer to convection. Farther from relaxation.
Smoke is a force.
In new drought we dwell.
Herein the soothing annual return of midsummer night cicadas and crickets and katydids as they tweak and trill like a rust-stuck fire alarm. Lots of those lately. Sirens and Red Flag Warnings. Mountains hushed by smoke. The sad irony of ash in my rain gauge. The thunderstormed omens of August, my 48th birthday month and favorite of the year, sometimes a ragged Leo web of life and death in a creative swirling orientation. Movements include south to San Diego, north to Banff. Lazy river days. Light and shadow. Love and anxiety—abundant like the dry fuels here tempting the sky.
Spiritual guidance of nature speaks through silent screams of late-night lightning, now frightening. The cloak of unstable encircling air is mythic ether and a wilderness that is a perfect future unto itself but unknowable for anyone until the local flood of flames prompts more toxic oxygen, more evacuations (inland Del Norte County), more road closures (U.S. Highway 199), and more untenable scorched earths (Smith River Complex et al).
All close yet so far from this faintly glowing Chetco watershed.
Set down your drink and watch the Moon wax blue.
Sound familiar?
Image: space.com
A "seasonal" Blue Moon as this month's is the third of four full Moons that shall shine within a season—solstice to equinox. Our last such Blue occurred two years yore. Alternatively, August 30 hosts a "monthly" Blue—the second of two full Moons in one month. (In the past decade, just six of the 121 full Moons were blue.) Not only is this the third of four successive supermoons in 2023, it is the closest (222,043 miles out!) and hence the year's largest.
Blue supermoons are rare, yes.
Not as rare as the Moon actually looking blue.
Recall humanity's ancient idiom "the Moon is blue" which had widely referred to any kind of impossibility. This was before 1883 when Krakatoa blew its top. The Indonesian volcano so clogged the atmosphere (nearly 5 cubic miles of rock fragments and a dense mess of ash across 300,000 square miles) that for a while sunsets worldwide were red and the Moon actually did appear blue. The ash particles—each one a micron (one-millionth of a meter) wide—fused with light that bounced off the Moon, scattering the long-wavelengths of red just enough for the bluer hues to spear down into our earthly eyeballs.
This has happened several times in recorded history.
This has also happened during large wildfires.
Lo, “once in a blue moon” blooms as colloquial referent to something occurring rarely, not full-stop-impossibly.
Thunder—happening now. Await the ominous flash. Sparse rain, fat drops. Gusty wind. Your nose is piqued for nearby ignitions. There's a new fire up the Winchuck River. Four in the wilds just east of Port Orford. Oblivious orthopteran insects continue to ring deep and true in fractured orange starlight that washes the meadows and parched prairies. Come morning, ocean fogfingers will reach up 'twixt gaps in coastal ridges beneath the hard stinking browns of haze aloft. In southwest Oregon and northwest California, August's lightning will strike not twice not hundreds but thousands of times.
The 2023 Super Blue Moon will receive none. No atmosphere up there. Our beloved celestial body above the holiness of electrostatic discharge. The gravity of our world. Above the smoke and the drought. Up there, yes—above everything. For now. So look down. Sometimes, where would you rather be?
U.S. Highway 199, Del Norte County, California, August 16, 2023. Photo: Bill Steven.
(top image) Lone Ranch Beach, Curry County, Oregon, August 15, 2023. Photo: Chris Sackett.
My home region, August 27, 2023. Source: Watch Duty.
