Last week wasn't much of a week. It started with an ice storm, ended with a snowstorm, and had lots of gray sky sandwiched in between. Thursday was sunny and calm, a glorious day, but it doesn't count because I spent it building a set of tractor chains for Friday's snow. Saturday, you may remember started with snow early and then became just another of our gray days of winter.

Waiting in line for takeoff from Syracuse that morning, the controller cleared a 727 ahead of me for takeoff and added wistfully " I hope you get to see some sun". Fat chance for me, I thought. I would be cruising at 4000 feet, not much more than half a mile above the ground on the flight to Elmira, certainly too low to be on top of clouds that looked as dark as these.

It was daytime, and I was flying. Most all of my flying is at night, but the routine was shaken up by the Friday storm, and I was re routed to Syracuse with an 8:30 AM return to Elmira. This happens about once a month, and even though the return flight is daylight, It is usually done in a shroud of cloud. Looking through the windshield, I foresaw another half hour of grayness ahead.

At first, I was right. I took off in the snow and was soon swallowed up by clouds. I turned on course, leveled off and set the autopilot. I had comfortably settled into the routine of "minding the store" when I abruptly found myself in clear air between two layers of clouds. There were clouds 500 feet below me, and another layer 3000 feet above me, and in between there was a hundred miles' visibility ahead and to each side.

This is a lot like someone who wiggles through a narrow passage in a cave and then takes a few more steps to discover himself in a huge vault that has never before been seen. This view had never been seen either, nor will it ever be seen again, because cloudscapes are always changing. Each moment's view is a new masterpiece of nature's art.

The cloud layer above me gradually broke up, first into little bands which allowed sunlight into my cavern, where it splashed brilliant white lines on the clouds below. The extra light also accentuated a group of darker clouds located miles to the west. At one point the clouds above were quite lacey, and at another point the clouds below rose in a series of smooth hills right up to my altitude.

I thought of the cloudscapes that I pass through every night, and how many of them must look just like this, and how others might be even better. On bright nights I can guess, but on most nights I pass through completely unaware. It is a world of absolutes; either you are in clouds or you aren't.

Gradually my Western New York acclimation started to rear its ugly head. I was annoyed by the brightness. I was just north of the Elmira airport, preparing to drop down into the clouds for the approach and landing. The sun was no longer screened by any clouds above me, and its bright light was accentuated by the brilliant white clouds that laid just below me.

The sun made bright streaks and shadows on the instrument panel, and caused the otherwise benign dirt on my glasses to become an annoyance. The breaks in the trifocal lenses became more apparent, and for that matter, it seemed that the prescription of the lenses is more appropriate for night vision, rather than for this sort of brightness.

Time to go home, I muttered. I had been holding back a little on my initial descent as I looked at the sun and clouds around me, but now I let the nose drop and the view outside quickly turned to gray. This was now the busy time, with rapid changes in heading, altitude, power settings and radio frequencies, and there was little time for reflection.

It was only a few minutes before the white fields, dark hedgerows and gray woodlots of the Chemung valley appeared, first straight below and then straight ahead as the plane descended through the last of the clouds. Less than 2000 feet of cloud separated the bright blue and white sky with it's golden sun from this netherworld of gray. Literally, it was a transition from technicolor to black and white.

Later that day it was still gray, and I looked up, knowing how close the sun really was. I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe I was like the groundhog that sees it's February shadow and scurries back underground for another six weeks of winter. Maybe I am happily acclimated to night and to winter, and don't want to be teased by false hopes. Maybe though I'm just a grumpy old woodchuck that refuses to see the light.