Hunting for dark nights and wishing on stars

Shadows cast 10 miles long as the last sun tucks between ridges and mountain tops. Dusk falls faster on our basin side and slower on the other side, the sunset watched not by looking toward it but by looking in the opposite direction toward blood-orange peaks. End-of-day light climbs the highest summits till it’s airborne, and we fall into the shadow of the Earth. My internal compass starts up, shoulders relaxing as I settle into cardinal directions, brain tingling with orientation.

My ass is sore from banging around all day on a broomstick. Is this spade-shaped taint-basher all we could think up for a bike seat design? At least I’m not crabbed over a keyboard, eyes two feet from a retina-splitting monitor, spinal column sinking toward the floor in a chair. It’s why I come out here, to shake myself off, cobwebs coughed out, pupils stretched as if waking. Nothing here is designed for us or our bicycles, certainly not this power-line road and not these Joshua trees, which don’t look like trees but like beasts occupied with their own spike-headed business. This is a definition of liberty, being rattled and jarred to pieces without anyone else’s concern.

My old friend Irvin Fox-Fernandez, wearing a warm hat and layers of coats, comes back from a walk up the wash, clutching woody flood debris in both hands, a husk of a Joshua tree appendage and tangled roots that died months ago. He’s got a wide-eyed half-smile on his face, a man back from a fine end-of-the-day walk. “The channels have all been reshaped by this last flood event,” he says. “There’s plenty of wood to burn.”

I’d said “no fires” on this trip, wanting to keep it night-sky-only, but the temperature is already dropping, so I say fire sounds perfect. The wood and crunched-grass kindling is dry enough that he gets it started with a single lighter flick. With a few huffs and puffs, his face close to the ground, he gets a flame going, and we both add sticks, snapping them in half one at a time. Fire has a redder wavelength than most artificial lights. The red end of the spectrum comes in long, languid wavelengths, which is why you can look up from a campfire and still see the stars.

They come out slowly through a margarita meltwater sky. More of Orion is visible than last night. The hunter constellation flaunts his scabbard or whatever is said to hang below that sideways belt of his. The red-eyed V of Taurus shows itself through the light-swamp. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades are still three.

The language of the night sky is easy to get back into, learning to identify a few constellations for reference, following the pointer stars of the Big Dipper to find the North Star. Take a picture of where the sun sets from the same place over weeks. Stand a stick in the ground and note shadows as they turn. Realize the greater spheres wheeling around us.

What helps is getting a particular star under your belt. Pick one that catches your eye and see where it’s going. Learn its class, its size, and its distance in light years. Find this star when you’re unsure what to think of life. Tell it a secret. Wish on it. If it disappears for a season or two, you’ll be pleasantly surprised the first time you see it come back into view. If it turns out to be a planet instead of a star — Jupiter and Venus are the brightest — then find it every few nights and see where it moves. You’ll notice it’s on a different plan than the stars behind it, which is why the Greeks called them wandering stars.

There are other techniques of awareness. As much as anyone, I suppose, I believe horoscopes. Sure, it could be relevant where celestial bodies lie when a person is born, equipotential lines of gravity and light plucking invisible threads, causing us to look up and not know why. I have my doubts about what Taurus will experience today, but I’m willing to entertain the notion, like hanging on to the fortune from a cookie for being spot on. If nothing else, astrology is a way of sending our imaginations upward and seeing what Ptolemy saw, what our many ancestors lived with, the sky being more than a pretty picture. Knowing the sign you were born under and the house that held your birth moon is a formality one should be familiar with. Taking notice is a matter of respect, since the heavens have been over us for so long, ancestors in themselves.

Taking notice is a matter of respect, since the heavens have been over us for so long, ancestors in themselves.

The night sky is no simple atlas. It is a machine with spinning rotors and jewels. It doesn’t need to be memorized for it to keep going. You don’t have to know the names of stars or constellations or what personality is bound to which sign. Respect can be nothing more than a glance, looking up and recognizing a greater scale at work.

Our heads are tipped up more than they’d been the night before. The general plane of visibility is rising. We’re set back from the four-lane where a river of headlights runs southbound for Las Vegas, and if drivers see us at all, which they don’t, we’re a flicker in the corner of the eye, something they’re not quite sure they saw.

More traffic is coming into the city, significantly more than what’s going out. Vegas must be building toward critical mass. Irvin says it’s the race, 10 days away now, and he’s probably right, a bump of 300,000 people estimated for the Grand Prix, coming with a $1.2 billion flush in the local economy. That’s what we’re seeing, jets lining up a dozen at a time to get into the airport and back out. Look down on this from space, bounce radars off cars and planes, and Vegas resembles a hive, a writhing mass of increasing light.

We’re too far out in the folds of bajadas and washes, curved around the edge of a mountain range, to get a line of sight on the city. Yet it is everywhere: Three-quarters of the sky is light-fog. That last quarter in the north is where darkness creeps in, outer space leaking through in the direction we’re heading.

I went to high school in Phoenix in the 1980s, and this is the distance from the city I’d drive with my date to park and swap hot breath on the bench seat of my dad’s truck. We’d get out and walk amongst saguaros as the sky glittered with stars, Orion as strong as ever. My observation is anecdotal, but this far outside a similarly sized desert metropolis four decades ago, the artificial light was more forgiving, not this platinum gleam. We wouldn’t have been making out in a front seat in this kind of light. From my own limited perspective, something has changed. We’ve moved the night sky farther away.

Our fire goes out, smothered in gravel and dust, burned down to a cup and a half of fine ash at the bottom of the wash. Irvin is wearing flip-flops, the rest of his body bundled warmly in the crispness. The wind has stopped, and a cold river of air flows down from the mountains, moving so slowly it could hardly turn a feather. A chill rises like water, first to our knees, then shoulders, then over our heads.

I stand with my hand in the air, with a sky quality meter device, intended to measure the night sky, raised so it won’t pick up backscatter from my clothes. I am the Statue of Luminosity, casting a shadow from Vegas. There’s no Milky Way; I can see where its powder should scatter across the expanse, but the space is empty. Flashing radio towers blink out of sync across the desert tens of miles away. I feel a little like I’m floating, gravity softened slightly, this new pull coming from above and not below. Fifteen minutes of readings get me to a magnitude 18.9, not much of a nudge from yesterday’s 18.7 hardly a complete step through that airlock and into space. The meter takes bites out of the visible spectrum, and I won’t pretend to understand the arc seconds involved in its readings, but a number offers a baseline. The darker the night becomes, the higher the number will go, and tomorrow, we’ll break 19 as we head into the Desert National Wildlife Refuge.

I rerun distances in my head. We’re biking slower than planned, and it’s also brighter than I expected and ten degrees colder than forecasted. In the morning, we’ll get off this powerline road and make a break for wilder country, hopefully picking up miles to get ourselves to the next level of the Bortle dark-sky scale.

My thighs burn from the day, and when I shimmy into my sleeping bag, the lactate pools in my muscles and I point my feet up and down to keep from cramping. Above our camp, a big matriarch Joshua tree stabs the pewter haze with shocking black daggers.

Shivering, not moving, we both hold onto pockets of warm air around our bodies. Irvin snores. I hear him on the other side of the pronged Joshua tree where our bikes are pitched. I snore, too, and he can hear me.

Neither of us is snoring when I wake and dig a hole out of my hood with a finger. He might be awake, too, but I don’t say anything. By 3 in the morning, most of the Big Dipper has swung around itself, like the hands of a clock. I can only see four of its brightest seven stars. A thumbtack hole of Jupiter is heading west, soon to set. I lie awake, listening to the streaking of the highway miles off. Semitrucks gear down around a curve, and above that, I pick up another sound like tinnitus, only it’s not my ears. Twenty miles from downtown, ten from the city limits, the rumble of life in Vegas is audible and its light takes up most of the sky.

There’s no crunch to my bag, no frost other than a slim ring around my breathing hole. I brought a tent for storms, and Irvin has a waterproof bivvy and a concoction of tarps. But we use neither. It’s better to set up in the open, nothing between us and everything else.

This essay is excerpted from The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light, which will be published this May from Torrey House Press.  All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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