Recently, Grant and I went camping in the Bighorn Mountains. We were fortunate to go on a night with a new moon and perfectly clear skies, and the stars were radiant and innumerable.Stars, of course, are always innumerable, but our capacity to perceive them is greatly limited by more local conditions, like sunlight during the day, like moonlight, cloud cover or light pollution at night, or even by our human frailties, like poor eyesight or sleepiness.
But the stars shine on regardless, and on certain nights like this one they revealed themselves to us in all their distant and unfathomable brilliance. The Milky Way was strung like a shimmering banner across the middle of the sky. Constellations too obtuse to name declared themselves boldly. The North Star confidently anchored the whole celestial orchestra as the stars rotated slowly and almost perceptibly across the sky.
The lack of cloud cover made the night crisp, and Grant I and lay bundled in coats and hats on an extra sleeping bag in the middle of a large meadow surrounded by pines. As always, he remained relentlessly inquisitive, peppering me with questions about the sky, and I taught him as best as I could about the sun, the moon, and the stars, about asteroids and meteors, about satellites and falling stars. His sharp mind grabbed the gist of it all, and soon his questions relaxed; our joint pursuit of the evening became to see a falling star.
With more stargazing experience I was able to pan my vision out and catch a larger area of sky; over then next hour I saw--not a lot--but dozens of shooting stars, ephemeral flashes of faint light zipping across the corner of my vision. I would point them out, but Grant would turn his head a fraction of a second too late, just after a scintillating streak had evaporated into darkness.If only I could predict in which pocket of the sky they would flash next; or if I could teach him to widen his focus and encompass a more panoramic vision of the night; or if a monster meteor would tear through the atmosphere and create an unmistakable arc of fire . . .
But time and again, I caught the faint streak out in my peripheral vision, exclaimed surprise and pointed, and Grant would turn, asking earnestly "Where, Daddy? Where?" To which I responded, "Oh, you just missed it, Buddy. Keep watching over this way . . .", and I would point, as if the odds of seeing one over there were somehow increased because I had just seen one there.
Seeking to reward his curiosity and enthusiasm, I turned his attention to satellites for a while, and he was better able to spot them as they criss-crossed the sky in their slow methodical orbits, flaring and fading as their metallic bodies spun and glinted in the invisible moonlight. This was a small success, but not as fleeting or fulfilling as a shooting star . . . and so still we hopefully gazed.
My mind began to drift in and out of the stars, to my oldest dreams of being an astronaut, to science fiction novels, to religion and science, to the agelessness and ancientness of the starry skies, which must have looked just as they had a hundred, a thousand, or even a million years ago, excepting the satellites. I began to perceive depth in the star-fields, convincing my brain that these were not dots on a sheet, but diamonds scattered disparately through the empty profundities of the universe . . .
And then suddenly a brilliant flash ignited directly overhead, blazing a long white-green arc across the middle of the sky that seemed suspended in air for a catchable second. "Ooooh!" I gestured. "Grant, did you see that?"
But my little buddy was quiet, and I glanced to his head nestled on my arm. He breathed deeply and contentedly, his face bathed in blue starlight, his eyes closed. I imagined him dreaming of brilliant and beautiful things, like these shimmering starfields on this moonless night in the mountains that lullabied him to sleep; or like the elusive shooting stars that he couldn't yet see, though his Daddy could, and that was enough for him.
