I could feel the cold moving up through the ground, winding blindly through the soil, through the dark narrows, the tree roots, the embedded ant tracks; it was the cold of a tired and sleeping earth, just there, beneath my feet. The night was quiet–no birds trilling, no cars in the distance, just the perfect gurgling of a stream, and the curling of fir branches before the wind blew.
The moon was exactly half. At first its light was faint–the ghostly white of a sand dollar that’s been bleached in the sun–hanging there over a hump in the hillside, but as the sky pulled into itself–darkening, deepening–the moon brightened, its shape distinct, highlighted. Its light caught in the lake, a strip of white reflected back onto the tree trunks, ripples breathing up and down, steady as the wings of geese.
I followed these ripples down to the lakeside, down to the soft soils and the red-orange grasses that reached up to my ankles. I knew the stars would be coming out soon–the lingering summer constellations; Boötes, and Corona Borealis, and Lyra, and maybe even Scorpius, tucked down at the southern horizon. I knew the sky would spiral soon, tilting around me, around the mountains and the lake, all of us caught up and moving toward dawn. I looked around to make sure no one else was out with me–no mountain lions, no bobcats, no moon-wakened bears.
This was true wilderness, after all–both federally designated and stereotypically pure, devoid of buildings, of roads, of motor boats. I was out there, way out, enfolded in alpine meadows. And yet there were still airplanes overhead–flight paths, streams of exhaust behind them–and the stars were still not as bright as they would’ve been a hundred years before, thanks to nearby cities. But there were far more than at home.
The first one I saw was Arcturus, the red star in the constellation Boötes. It would be a while before all the constellations surfaced, and I was getting cold.
I waited long enough to see the exoskeleton of the Milky Way, dampened by the moon, rising from the hillside and across the entire sky, resting in the forests behind me. I waited long enough for everything to turn that certain shade of purple that comes between sunset and darkness. I waited until everything felt unbearably still, except the stream still gurgling behind me. The trees became serrated shadows, their arms extended, their heads bent in reverence. I did the same, my hands wrapped in black gloves, my arms stiff beneath four layers of clothing. The cold was circling, rising.
I didn’t make it until the stars were in their full brilliance. I curled up in my tent and fell asleep far too soon. The last I saw was the beginning of true darkness, when the smallest stars–the ones I could never see at home–were finally visible, almost fuzzy in their distance, and the moon was sitting right on top of a spruce tree, an ornament upon its crown. Everything was quiet, blue, and huddled close. And, as I fell asleep, although I regretted not staying up later, I was glad that the sky was there, that the trees were waiting in the smoke-tinged wind, that the moon was lowering into the backs of old volcanoes. And, most of all, I was glad that I was huddled there, my back against the earth.
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I’m the author of four environmental and science fiction novels: Call of the Sun Child, Listen, The Seas of Distant Stars, and Blue Mar.
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