Dark Skies
Quite a few years ago I picked up a couple of Chicago boys off a ride board in Madison, Wisconsin headed west and eventually to a student exchange program in Mexico City. The three of us sat in the cab of my ’68 Chevy truck, the same pickup I’d just finished driving down to New Orleans, over to the Florida panhandle, up to Maine and back to Wisconsin, now headed to Seattle. The boys threw their backpacks into the back along with mine and we motored west. Part way across the Dakotas I asked them if they’d ever been backpacking and of course, being Chicago born and raised, they said no. “You’re in luck then, let’s head up into the Big Horns and hike in for a night or two.”
The first part of the trip the boyz were pretty unsure what to make of me. No job, beat up truck, a vagabond cruising the highways of an America they’d never seen, why would they trust him? But the road makes for intimate relationships, I’ve found, and this one was no different. We left the pickup at a campsite above Buffalo in the National Forest and hiked into the wilderness, the boyz trusting me as a guide and mentor now. The first night we built a campfire, then after dinner, laid out under the stars.
Wyoming has some of the darkest skies in America and up in the Big Horn’s elevation there are more stars than most of us have ever seen, enough to humble a mere human on a planet circling a sun that’s one miniscule speck in the vast unknowable universe. In the Windy City stars don’t even exist. So when Jason sees his first falling star, he asks what was that? A meteor, I tell him nonchalantly. Oh right, chimes in Brian, totally disbelieving such objects are observable. He thinks maybe it was an airplane.
‘An airplane? I say. “What, with a tail wing on fire?” But the boys are unconvinced, no way were they witnessing an extraterrestrial object igniting in earth’s atmosphere. And then we saw another. And another. And plenty more. By the time our campfire had burned to embers they were convinced. And amazed. Something they would tell their kids about, the night the sky filled with falling stars.
Course, if their kids go in search of meteor showers, they’ll see instead the thousands of Starlink satellites cluttering the skies on the vacation their fathers take them back out west. “C’mon, Dad, those are just airplanes,” they’ll probably protest. And maybe Dad will glimpse a memory from long ago, the one I keep with all those wishes from that magic night before we three hiked back down to the rest of our lives.
Tags: Meteor Shower, Shooting Stars, Starry Starry Night