“The Meaning of Air,” by Boyce Upholt (Fiction ’16)

“The Meaning of Air,” an essay by 2016 fiction alum Boyce Upholt, recently appeared in Emergence Magazine. Read an excerpt below:

The Meaning of Air

…THERE ARE PEOPLE, I guess, who regularly regard the air—cloud watchers lying on their backs in the grass, contemplating the meaning of a breeze. I come from a different tradition of nature watching. What I have always wanted is contact. “The solid earth!” as Henry David Thoreau once put it, standing atop a barren mountain. “[T]he actual world!” The material things, the rocks and soils: the dust from which life emerged, to which we will return.

Until recently, the closest I’d come to contemplating the sky was a five-week commitment to sunrise. A few years ago—after the death of my father, after a dismaying US election, amid the final fraying of a six-year relationship—I canoed a thousand miles down the Mississippi River, camping on islands and sandbars. I wanted to be in a landscape that made me feel small, that showed me something bigger. I made it a point to rise before dawn each morning so that I could watch the sky shift from the gray scale of morning twilight to gentle oranges and pinks, until these were overtaken by the spreading blue.

But what was a sunrise? What produced such pastel magic? These were questions I could not answer—questions I did not even think to contemplate.

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-meaning-of-air/