One night last week I did something I hadn’t done in something like 50 years. At 1:00 am, after the half moon had set off to the west, leaving the sky to darkness, I got my supplies together and headed out to the backyard. I spread a tarp on the ground, laid out a lounge chair cushion to serve as a mattress, unrolled my sleeping bag, fluffed my pillow and settled in to a night of sleeping under the stars.
I was out to find the Perseid meteor showers on this perfect night. These ancient pieces of comet debris, after traveling billions of miles through space, would hit the earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate in long flashes of light, clearly visible to anyone able to access a dark sky. The scientists were saying that this year’s show would be particularly spectacular.
Our days have been sunny and hot without a cloud in sight, so the night view from my pillow was clear and unobstructed. Perfect. A gazillion stars and the Milky Way revealed themselves as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I scanned the skies looking for the streaks of light from falling meteors. “Oh there’s one!”. Then it vanished, to be replaced by another. I stopped counting at 40.
A long ago memory returned in those long hours under the stars. I remembered being 10 and doing the exact same thing on a summer night in the back forty of Lori’s country house. Shooting stars we called them.
This time, I didn’t last the night outside, and by 3:30 or so went back inside to a warm, dry bed. I was starting to feel the damp of the dew but it wasn’t just that which drove me back in. The truth is lying alone in the dark under that enormous star-filled sky became overwhelming. We feel we are the center of the universe, either individually or collectively. Not the case after all. Talk about feeling insignificant. And humble.
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the gardenJoni Mitchell – Woodstock
Postscript: Back in the day, Lori and I got up the next morning before dawn and went for a long bike ride along the tree-lined, quiet country roads, watching the sun come up and stopping at the turkey farm to harass the turkeys out in the field beside the road. Does everyone know how to do that? You stand there and give a yell, there is a brief pause, and then the turkeys (hundreds of them) respond in kind, until a huge wave of noise spreads over the land. Gradually it dies down, until just a few clucks remain. Then you do it again. I’m surprised, and not a little grateful, that the farmer didn’t shoot us on the spot.
Fifty years later, I could barely drag myself out of bed at 10:00 am (unusual) and then had to have a nap later in the day (unheard of). I was completely wrecked the entire day after my nocturnal adventures. Oh well, some things change, but maybe not that much.
Night sky photo from NASA/Fred Bruenjes