I couldn't help thinking of Simon and Garfunkel's "deep and dark December". The weather has been dreary, and on this morning too, the dawn was fighting a largely unsuccessful battle with the gloom of night. The temperature was below freezing, but not a lot. There was some breeze, but not a lot. There was light in the sky, but there was no inspiration. It was an indifferent daybreak.

Climbing away from Syracuse, the low clouds swallowed the airplane with an ineffectual slowness. It was as though the sky was too lethargic to take the plane in one gulp. I knew that my climb would take me above the cloud tops, but the sky had been so dull for so long that I didn't even think of how nice it might be. For the moment, it meant only that the ice that was forming on the airplane would be of no consequence. I quietly chided weather that was so boring that it couldn't even bring bad news.

As I neared my 6000 foot cruising altitude, the sky above was growing brighter, and I lowered the nose to make a transition from climb to cruise. Suddenly the plane broke through the top of a very flat cloud deck. The transition was so abrupt, and the sensation of speed so great, that I was startled. A bolt of fear shot through me a fraction of a second ahead of the realization that nothing was abnormal.

For a few seconds I scooted along, half in the clouds, and half in the sun. I couldn't help feeling that I was in a speedboat that had no freeboard, and at any second the clouds would pour over the gunwales and sink me into the abyss. I felt giddy with delight, happy to have slipped the bonds of the dullscape below, and amused by the silly thoughts that my imagination had swept through me.

I flew just above the flat clouds for thirty miles before they started to develop a bit of ruffle, and I could see larger disturbances in the clouds further ahead, where the underlying terrain is rougher. I looked for a pattern within the clouds that would suggest the influence of Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, but found none; apparently the air temperature wasn't low enough to make their heat rise through the tops.

The beauty of this trip had caused me to recall a flight during December's first cold snap, when the two biggest finger lakes were genuine weather- makers. The waters still held a lot of the summer's heat, and the air temperature just a mile above them was almost zero. The lakes absolutely boiled their warmth and moisture into the frigid air above them.

The wind was north enough that it traveled down the lakes, rather than across them, and it kept this moisture in a stream instead of diffusing it along each lake's eastern hills. Long mountains of clouds were burst through the cloud deck below me. From sunny blue sky east of Cayuga, I descended into these clouds and through their snow until emerging into a sunny day a few miles from Elmira.

On this giddy morning though, there was no sun in Elmira. I knew that I would break through the slate gray overcast about a thousand feet above the ground as I approached to land. Passing Ithaca, I was cleared to descend to 3300 "feet at my discretion", and I discreetly took a few minutes to enjoy the day's first and only look at the sun.

The cloud tops were now rolled into gentle hummocks and swales, and like a sleigh riding to Grandma's house, I rode the plane over the bright and drifted cloudscape. As I crested a ridge, it was time to turn towards the airport, and I slid down along the face of the cloud and into the mists at the bottom.

A few minutes later I dropped into the gray netherworld below the clouds, but in my mind I had saved some sparkles of my sleigh ride. I kept them close, and they brightened the rest of my day.

East of Cayuga Lake, looking west northwest, the two lines of clouds lay directly above the long and slender Cayuga and Seneca Lakes.