When I was younger I was invited to join a Skylarking Society.

 

I've never been much of a joiner. Most times I simply don't fit into structured, organized groups. Ah, but the Skylarking Society was just my cup of tea.

 

I suppose I could liken it to a support group for day dreamers. A congregation, a clan if you will, of ill-fitting imaginative types who find value in lying upon their backs on pleasant afternoons and watching clouds morph into vaguely recognizable shapes.

 

We Skylarkers were the ones who drifted away from conventional channels and followed our own paths to independent conclusions. Who were we tuning out? It might have been a teacher, a drill sergeant, a nagging or henpecking parent or partner. Any authority figure really; that one particular person who is trying to conform you to a rigid perspective or point of view.

 

Lackadaisical losers, sufferers of short attention spans. Doodlers, dawdlers, disruptive, easily distracted minds latching on to the first fascinating image to randomly pass on by. That was the label anyway, the predominant stereotype that others seemed inclined to slap on our grass-stained backs.

 

Among my fellow skylarkers, I regognized likeminded individuals who had perhaps just learned to freeze out the chatter, the static, the incessant cacophony of a dysfunctional family life, abusive parent or hyper-critical peer.

 

I understood the Walter Mitty-sort of transition that took place in my Skylarking brethren, the comfortable, safe place in the mind where the John Lennons retreat and curl up when confronted with... the conventional channels.

 

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix. All of them were mainstream musicians from the 1960s who spoke for an entire generation of skylarkers, whose motto at one point was "turn on, tune in, drop out."

 

Close your eyes, relax and float down stream. I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering. Everybody seems to think I'm lazy. I don't mind, I think they're crazy. White collar conservative flashin' down the street, pointin' their plastic finger at me. Theyre hopin' soon my kind will drop and die, but I'm gonna wave my freak flag high. High!

 

These lyrics all spoke to the inner, day dreaming me. They gave me license to follow my own rhythms and explore my own paths. I became content to stare up at the sky without pausing to question or wonder why. And when I did study the heavens and analyze the ever-morphing clouds, one particular class of vapor rose to the top of my fascination chart: contrails.

 

Cumulus clouds are cool, with their flat bottoms and puffy, bulging bodies. Cirrus clouds soar so high with their thin, wispy plumes. But nothing stretches so gloriously across the sky as contrails, those long, white vapor trails created by jet aircraft at high altitude.

 

The thing that amazes me about contrails is that you can rarely even hear the jet that's making them, and sometimes you can't even see it either. That speck of an aircraft turns the heavens into an almighty Etch A Sketch, a celestial chalkboard for aviators, a canvas of monumental proportions.

 

When I was a child, we would call such aircraft "sky writers." They were like thick white felt pens that marked the page, the sky in cotton like ink. Contrails are actually artificial cirrus clouds created by the exhaust of aircraft engines or wingtip vortices, which in turn precipitate a stream of tiny ice crystals in the moist, frigid upper air. That's the science of it anyway.

 

Some of the most impressive photos of contrails were taken by military photographers high above Europe during World War II. Massive fleets of bombers would streak across the Continent, en route to bomb Germany, leaving billowing tracks behind them in corduroy perfection.

 

In my mind, I could imagine the bomber crews, clad in brown, wool-lined leather jackets, donning oxygen masks, struggling to keep warm in their frozen, high altitude environment. I could see their contrails through the eyes of the tail gunner in his plexiglass domain, riding backwards at hundreds of miles per hour, staring at the vapor lines leading back toward England.

 

Today when I watch a jet leave its mark across a broad, blue stretch of atmosphere, I contemplate where it is going. Perhaps to some lush, green tropical island, or perhaps a large, teaming metropolitan airport. I visualize the passengers; the important businessman heading to a major meeting; the family en route to a long anticipated reunion; the lone college student leaving home for the first time in his or her young life.

 

Contrails carry me back to my more rebellious days and remind me of all the great music from that Golden Era of Rock and Roll. I think of Major Tom, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or Benny and the Jets; I relate to all the colorful iconoclasts that populate rock's great pantheon, and connect with a generation that dared to dream and be different.

 

Don't attempt to second guess me though, if you spot me on my back outdoors somewhere with a wry smile stretched across my familiar face. You may laugh and tell a friend, "There's Hoyt the skylarker, probably lost in thought about contrails and classic rock."

 

You could say that, and you might be right. But just as likely, you would be wrong.