Chapter 10 - Big Skies

A childhood memory. A distant tragedy. 

Seven stars in the night sky. A light passing silently overhead.

In this final chapter of the first series, Drew reflects on horizons, wonder, perspective and the curious way understanding often arrives long after the moment itself.

A gentle journey beneath the skies that shaped him, and a return to the small pond where all his stories begin.

This Chapter is dedicated to the memory of those 18 people who died in the crash of USAF Aircraft  67-006 on  28 August 1976.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome. Each week I'll be sharing stories, stories drawn from real life, from people I've met and moments I've witnessed, sometimes remembered as they were, and sometimes softened by time, but always brought to you with kindness and care. Welcome to Big Skies and Small Ponds. Chapter ten Big Skies One of the guiding concepts for this project has been that no matter where you are, no matter how small your pond, eventually a whole world can be reflected in it. Even if nothing else is happening, the sky is there, maybe brilliant blue, my favourite colour, maybe dark with the approaching menace of thunder and rain, or maybe scattered with clouds or stars, a constant yet ever changing presence which hangs over everything we do. For as much as the sea has this power to draw me in, I have come to feel that its greatest magic is in a joint enterprise between sea and sky. No wonder so many poets have written of them as if they were eternal lovers. As a child there were times when lying on a grassy bank, you'd stare up into the vast blueness of it all, watching the passage of a plane, leaving its white trails behind, the plane vanishing from sight, and eventually those trails dissolving like candy floss on the tongue. It was not unusual to see and hear a skylark long before I read those words written by Shelley Hail to thee blithe spirit or sat in a concert hall as Rayform Williams The Lark Ascending filled the air. No, I'd already known something of that feeling in real life. There were days when nothing marred the blue, not a cloud, a bird or a plane. Perhaps the only faint hum of the electricity wires shared the space with your thoughts in those long, hot summers of the past. Days when the sky felt like a counterpane of serenity. I was around fourteen, I think. We, my siblings and myself, were out in the fields near our home in Gedney Hill, just doing what children do in places like that, which is to say not very much at all. As we've already established, there's a lot of sky in that part of the world, big, open, uninterrupted sky, the kind that makes everything else feel small. And on this day something happened in it. Not near us, not close enough to touch or even properly understand, just over there. I don't remember anyone shouting or running. I don't remember fear just that sense that something wasn't quite right something beyond the comprehension of children, maybe. But you know how sometimes the ordinary shifts just slightly and you can feel it before you can name it. Well it was sort of like that, but just for a moment, and then life carried on. We stood, or or maybe we didn't even stand for long. I can't honestly say, because the truth is I don't remember enough of that day, and in hindsight, I really think I should. Even though we were children, and even though it was distant, and of course when you're fourteen, distance has a way of making things smaller than they are, so whatever it was, it just stayed over there. Later, of course, the grown ups knew more. And I remember people coming to talk to us American voices, uniforms, I think. I'm not sure though, 'cause my memory does play its tricks. But they came to ask what we'd seen over there in the sky. There were questions to which we had few answers. Did they explain what had happened? Perhaps. I don't remember the details. Only the tone measured, careful, as if they were choosing words that children might understand and that wouldn't land too heavily. Which in a way they didn't. Because even then it didn't quite reach us not fully. Life has a habit of doing that. Letting things happen and then quietly putting them on a shelf somewhere until one day you take them down again. Big skies and small ponds with Drew Baxter. Years later, I took that memory down from the shelf. I'm not sure why. I decided to go looking for something. Perhaps it had just stayed with me in a quiet way that things do. So I found myself out there again. The sky just as big, the fields just as still. Not the same field, but that field where it had happened. The one that for us was over there. A field with trees. An ordinary place you might drive past without a second glance, but there was a stone a stone and a flag. A memorial. Standing in the middle of all that space under that huge sky. I walked up to it and read the names one by one. No noise, no ceremony, just names and the wind moving across the fens. And in that moment, once again, something shifted. Because of course it wasn't over there anymore. It wasn't distant. It was here. When I was fourteen, it had been something in the sky, something we saw but didn't really feel. But standing there many years later, reading those names, I realized that sometimes when we're young we witness things without yet knowing how to carry them. And maybe that's part of life. We don't always understand things in the moment that they happen. Sometimes we just have to grow into them. The night sky. I remember being shown something in it once many years ago, the plough. I was young, stood outside somewhere dark enough for the stars to make their full appearance. Not the faint scattering you sometimes see now, but a sky properly filled with stars. And someone and I can't now remember who, but they stood beside me and pointed upwards. Can you see that? At first I couldn't. It all looked the same, just stars. But then slowly the pattern began to emerge. Not because it changed, but because I was shown how to look, to see those stars set out in a shape that suddenly made sense. A handle, the bowl, the plough. And once you've seen it, well you you couldn't unsee it. It was always there. It had always been there. I just hadn't known how to find it. And I think about that sometimes. How many things there are in life just like that, not hidden, just waiting for us to be shown. Because that moment wasn't really about the stars, it was about something quieter than that, standing beside someone, being guided, learning to see something that had always been there. And even now I find myself somewhere dark, and I'll look up, and I'll search, and I find it again, those same stars unchanged. And then every now and then something else appeared. A single point of light moving steadily across the sky. No flashing, no sound, just passing through. And this time I know what I'm looking at. That was the International Space Station. A thing we have built and placed into that same sky, and there it was circling above us. I find myself thinking of it in the same way that I do when I look for the plough. You can stand still, you can remain curious, and even as old as you get, you can still be a little in awe. Because the feeling isn't all that different. As a child, I was being shown something that had always been there. Now I've learned to watch something that we have added. But both belong the ancient and the new, the stars we named, and the light we sent up to join them. And I suppose that's what strikes me most, that even as we grow, even as we learn, even as we build and send things into the sky, we're still in our own way just standing underneath it, looking up, trying to understand. And perhaps somewhere in that we're still learning how to see. And if you grow up under big skies, you learn quite early how small you are, and how much there is that you don't control. And then as you get older, you forget until life finds its own way of reminding you. Big skies and small ponds with Drew Baxter. This ends our first series of Big Skies and Small Ponds. We have reached our horizon. And what is an horizon really? Not an ending, not even a destination, but an invitation. So for all that talk of big skies I find myself now coming back to something much smaller. The pond. Because most of us don't live our lives out there on or beyond the horizon, we live them here, in smaller places, familiar places, the same paths, the same rooms, the same faces. A small pond. And yet even there if you stop and look, you'll see it the sky reflected, clouds drifting through it, light shifting across it, sometimes still, sometimes broken by the slightest ripple. And in that small space there are horizons too, and not the kinds you travel towards, but the kind that quietly opens within you. Because we might never reach that far horizon out there, no matter how far we travel, but these inner ones, they are reachable. A thought you hadn't considered before, a kindness you chose where once you might not have, a moment of understanding where there was once only reaction. Tiny changes, but real ones. Because perhaps that's what those inner horizons allow us to do. Not become someone else, not escape the pond we're in, but to take the time to see it differently, to notice more, to judge less and to understand a little deeper, and maybe just maybe to realise that as content as we may be in our own small world, there is something rather wonderful in seeing the reflection of others. And that's where big skies meets small ponds. I'll be taking a short break, and hopefully I'll be back with chapter eleven of Big Skies and Small Ponds later this year. But between now and then, do keep an eye open for a special chapter or two. The easiest way to make sure you don't miss it, well, if you would be so kind, and to subscribe to the podcast. And maybe if you have liked what you've heard, tickle that little like button too. It's been my pleasure to share my stories with you, and thank you to all who have reached out with kind hearts and warm words, even from as far away as Egypt. Thank you, Ahmed. Thank you all. But for now, and until we meet again, as always, enjoy writing and living your own story.