When I sit up in bed, I see the low red dome of moon blazing between snarled shapes of dead trees with all the wrath of an African sun.
It’s 10:30 at my parents’ house in Wyoming, and I can’t sleep. I see a dark shape—maybe Rowdy—slip hyena-like through a patch of light by the backyard fence; I hear her pass beneath the window. The grass makes the sound of fire.
A single cloud, low in the sky and lit by the blood-colored moon, looks unreal and too close, like a prop made of paper-mache. The stars seem less than a mile away. They shine, undiminished, through the leafless trees, which glow in the porch light, every limb white and striking. Nothing moves.
I put on a coat and shoes on the porch and go outside, walking up the dirt road until it’s too dark and I have to stop. Out here, the sky reveals its true color—not black at all, but a deep blue against inky shapes of mountains. The darkness seems to amplify the sound of a coyote barking from a distant part of the woods. Our three dogs pile around me, whining and pawing at my shins, and don’t seem to hear it.
Beside me, a low hill rises from the pasture like a rounded loaf of bread. If I stand here long enough, the shapes of animals might be viewed as they slip over the horizon or stand like tin cut-outs for long moments before dipping into the darkness. When I was in high school, the dogs startled a herd of deer out of the woods on the way to the canal one night. I heard their hooves and saw antlers flash against the sky as they bounded past me, and I recalled a video of a hunter being gored by a mule deer; a moment later, six or seven figures shot over the hill in a tight bunch.
I don’t walk far tonight. The road, somewhere in the darkness, is rocky and uneven, and all I really want to do is look at the stars. I’d wait for my eyes to adjust, but there’s nothing to adjust to—the ground is black, no matter how long I stare at it.
Map of artifical night sky brightness
A few years ago, I found a map illustrating the level of artificial night sky brightness in different parts of the world. Coastal cities and islands vary from neon green to white at the brightest end of the spectrum; Africa’s vast center reflects the impenetrable darkness of Joseph Conrad’s Congo, while a few lights cluster at its edges like a spray of pimples. With the exception of isolated cities and nearly the entire Pacific-West, the United States emits only a weak grey glow beyond the Mississippi—a likely by-product of suburban sprawl. At a closer look, one can make out black blobs scattered throughout the grey, probably marking mountain ranges and places like this—the sticks, the boonies, the middle-of-nowheres of the world that appear as abysmal pits amid an increasing array of shinier, more lively regions.
I remember studying the clusters of light and tried to determine what they were made of. In Billings, Montana, I know that these lights represent at least two Denny’s restaurants and the LDS temple, which glows like a mythical white castle below the bluffs and the large houses that line them. One of those specks down on the bottom marks the house I rent with my boyfriend, near the lights of the strip-mall where we buy coffee and rent movies. It’s a comfortable enough life among the lights, but there’s mystery in darkness, and real, non-fluorescent beauty–especially on a cold fall night when everything seems stretched tight, brittle and sharp, pulsing with life from unknown sources. Animals respond to each other in the darkness; our single porch doesn’t phase them. In fact, from a quarter-mile away, it appears to be nothing more than a lower, lesser star.
Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll head back to the city—a small city, just a dusting of light, but a city, nonetheless, with casinos and restaurants and thousands of vehicles driving to them.
Back inside, I relax into bed, finding myself squinting into a beam of light. Out the window, the moon has risen, and looking at it surface, still unmarred by outrageous steeples and McDonalds signs, I guess I should feel lucky to have a clear view.
