When I first started coming to Reston in the summer of 1987, I did not pay a lot of attention to the skies.
We had just moved down from Halifax, NS and were living in Columbia, Md. Just getting on the beltway and making it to our office in Reston was major victory for some who biggest traffic worries had been the Halifax rotaries.
Our move to Roanoke gave me a few years vacation from coming to Reston. In 1993 when I became manager of higher education business in the Mid-Atlantic, I quickly moved our team from Columbia to Reston.
It turned out to be a wise decision. Not many years passed before the Columbia office was closed and the Reston office for Apple was the only one between New York and Atlanta. After a few years of coming to Reston, I started to appreciate the convenience of Reston.
I really enjoyed working in the area. Besides fighting the traffic, only one thing would get to me. As I would come in the Northern Virginia from the west, I could almost always see the haze. Somehow descending into the haze was a good metaphor for selling computer to the enterprise for a company who clearly only wanted to consumer business.
Still Reston was a great place, and I used to enjoy some of the spectacular sunsets, but I never could find a place where I could capture one.
As the years moved on and we got past 2000, our perch on the mountain in Roanoke was witness to a changing environment in the valley below us. As more and more trucks poured down Interstate 81, Roanoke became victim the same haze that covers Northern Virginia. The signature view that is at the top of my View from the Mountain blog became a lot harder to capture.
Roanoke and Reston still get blue sky days after a rain or some particularly strong winds, but truly blue skies are not the default.
You cannot have that many cars and trucks and not pay the price. If you live in it, you do not see it.
Coming from the coast where blue skies are the rule, it is especially noticeable. What is also easy to detect is how quickly those of us who get hooked on those blue skies complain went they are not around.
The picture in the post was taken yesterday morning. It is the sky above our home in Bluewater Cove, near Cape Carteret, NC.
Today was abnormally cool for this time of year at about 50 degrees, it was also cloudy with no sunshine. We were coming back from a walk in the tidal marshes this afternoon, and I started complaining about the lack of blue skies.
My wife quickly brought me back to reality. She pointed out that we had blue skies almost all week except at sunset when we seemed to pick up some light clouds.
It shocked me that I could react so strongly to one day of clouds. I guess it is time for winter to be over so we can all be out in the sunshine in our shorts.
The good news is that the strawberries are ripe here on the NC Coast so I suspect warmer temperatures and even more sunshine are on the way. Now if we can just get the wind to stop blowing.
