Tangled Up in Blue

Some memories are cast in black & white, others get tangled up in blue

In my mind the moment is tangled up in blue.

It was a classic mid-1960’s summer road trip to “the lake” in the family station wagon loaded with leaky coolers and beach towels and brightly-colored swim fins. The air would have been laden with the smells of suntan lotion and dog breath, my mother smoking in the front seat. It was my first trip to the “big lake” as my parents called it. Other years we had gone to Lake Winnebago and in my young mind this would be simply a bigger version of that.

Along the way, after the tousling with my brothers and sister settled down and the dog relaxed, I fell asleep to the sedating hum of the highway. I must have slept through our arrival somehow because when I finally opened my eyes, I was alone on the sun-warmed vinyl of the backseat, covered in a beach towel. No other cars next to us. Out the front window, a large sand dune rose blocking my view. There was only the soft rasp of waves and the chatter of gulls.

I crawled out and began climbing the dune which seemed immense to my little legs, slipping one step down for every two steps up so that the moment comes back to me in a kind of slow motion. When I finally crested the top, the world changed.

What spread out before me was something I had never imagined – blue-winged horizons farther than my eyes could see or my young mind imagine. A cavalcade of white caps on the water mimicked by the white commas of gulls in the sky. The immensity of it both stunned me and thrilled me. The Big Lake.

I don’t really remember the rest of that day, which surely included burnt hot dogs on the grill, burying each other in the sand, throwing sticks for the dog and mother yelling “be careful” each time we stepped towards the water. But I’ll never forget that moment standing alone atop the dune when I first understood in my bones the power and beauty of nature, a memory forever painted in blue.

It is that same blue that I see on these mid-summer journeys into the Apostle Islands aboard the Little Dipper. That rich blue of the summer sky; the darker, even richer blue of the big lake.

I know in part of my brain that the color is simply the interplay of wavelengths of light - the atmosphere scattering the sunlight streaming down to earth in all directions, the short (450-495 nm) waves of blue scattered more than longer (620-750 nm) waves of red and white making the sky seem, to our eyes at least, that classic summer blue.

But we don’t see only with our brains and so blue, like many colors, is rich in history and symbolism, letting us see it, too, with our hearts.

A recent study at the University of Maryland confirmed what others have known for decades: the most common “favorite color” in the world is blue. From “Blue Moons” to “Blue Suede Shoes,” we love the color blue. Any yet, it is rare in nature, with few natural mineral sources from which to derive that heavenly color. The Egyptians created the first synthetic blue by combining silica, lime, copper, and alkali. Later, in Europe, it was found that blue textile dye could be formulated from a flowering plant known as “woad” although the process was expensive leading to the idea of “royal blue” worn only by nobility and to blue being seen as a symbol of wealth. The lower class was stuck with browns and greens and less costly colors to produce.

Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, “The Virgin in Prayer” (1640–50), oil on canvas (National Gallery, London)

Painters too longed for the perfect color blue, grinding up semi-precious stones like lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan to create an “ultramarine blue” (literally “beyond the sea”). Because of its expense, the color was most often used in commissioned works and found in many early religious paintings particularly of the Virgin Mary lending blue the symbolism of purity and holiness.

For all its symbolism of wealth and power and purity, there is a bluer side to blue - the slow ache of distant horizons, the loneliness of the hour just after sunset, the blue void in the immensity of the universe. That immensity is touchingly depicted in “The Pale Blue Dot” - a photograph of Earth created by the Voyager 1 space probe on February 14, 1990 from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. “Look again at that dot,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his book The Pale Blue Dot, “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

(photograph from the NASA collection)

Yet for all of the unfathomable distances of space and the finery of nobility or famous works of art, it is a simpler memory that comes to mind as I drift like a summer cloud on the Little Dipper these hot July days: a long ago summer moment when a child struggled barefooted to the top of a sand dune and looked out at a world grown bigger than his young mind had ever thought possible.

The world grew wings in that moment, and those wings were blue.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted.

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