Stars

I had just descended Mt. Scott, the most prominent peak in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.

I stayed on the peak until the sun set completely over the lake, turning the pairing of the light blue sky and dark blue water into a cauldron of colors from other side of the spectrum.

Ah, Mt. Scott is good.

I skipped downhill along the five-mile trail. What a day: I arrived in early afternoon after leaving Portland that morning, and I had plenty of time to wander around the rim of this massive hole in the ground formed by a collapsed volcano. I snapped panoramas from my point-and-shoot and gazed down at Wizard Island, which is itself a volcanic cinder cone that erupted after the larger Mount Mazama exploded almost 8,000 years ago. Once night fell, I sat in my car munching a granola bar, planning my next move.

I intentionally bypassed the park’s campground — the 10 bucks or whatever it cost to get a site fell outside of my budget.

Naturally, I did nothing, and when the sun’s last tendrils receded I settled into my cockpit and kicked out the jams.

I stared into the stars, and though it was August, an omnipresent chill forced me to bundle up. The rim of the lake is about 7,000 feet above sea level, after all.

I ended up sleeping — napping, really — on a vista turnoff on the road that circled the lake.

Lucky for me, no rangers happened by and I wouldn’t be getting a fine that night. That left me to enjoy the obscenely bright sky. I’ve never seen stars that bright before or since, so I put on some ethereal music and scribbled notes on the purpose of life. I must have been in a hurry, because my existential scribble keeps referring to Earth as Garth. My writing from that night is one long string of questions. But I do pause enough to point out that space is the final frontier. Heavy! Then I say, “No, the ocean too, I think. Our past is below and our future is above.”

I may have meant that literally, because I tallied two shooting stars and three moving satellites in a 20-minute period. When the number of satellites outweighs the number of natural celestial occurrences, the future is here, and it’s crowded. Did you know: Nearly 1,000 satellites orbit Earth. About half of those are American satellites, and half of those are commercial satellites.

But I was too hypnotized by the natural stars to worry about those fake ones. There is nothing absolutely nothing as beautiful as seeing a western sky when you’ve lived your life on the east coast.

A few days later, as I drove through the Nevadan desert at night, I remember looking up through the cloud of sand and seeing a thousand sparkling diamonds sewn onto a sheet as black as coal. I found a rest area somehow (at least, I think it was a rest area… I remember a small square space on the side of the road with a fence around it) and parked. I needed a nap, so I took the time to gaze.

I first really noticed the sky when I took a backpacking trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire for college credit (cha-ching!).

During that late-spring week in those granite mountains, when the days are hot and sweaty but the nights are still chilly, cradled between Carter Dome and Wildcat Mountain, I looked up at the coal black sky and saw thousands of diamonds.

I recall leaving the warmth of my sleeping back and discovering that my boots were still wet, and regretting that I went barefoot out into the frigid air. But the stars seemed to cut through the chill, through my breath manifesting itself visually as thick wisps of cloud. And my, the stars never looked so bright.

Until I got to Wyoming, and then Oregon, then northern California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho…

 

 
The Scenic Route of All Things
photography

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