The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  A few nights later I find myself sitting alone on a pile of massive rocks, waiting to meet the darkness of Natural Bridges National Monument. In 2006, the IDA named Natural Bridges its first International Dark Sky Park. The NPS Night Sky Team had ranked the level of darkness as 2 on the Bortle scale, and as Chris Luginbuhl explained, “Basically, that means it’s the darkest or starriest sky they’ve seen while doing these reviews.”

  Kevin Poe is right: You can drive to “the darkest or starriest sky they’ve seen.” You can park in paved parking, use the clean basic outhouse, walk the paved path to the overlook. I’m not saying you have to—there are backcountry options as well—but don’t think just because many consider this the darkest place in the National Park system that you can’t get here easily. True, the drive takes a while, and if you come the way I did, you climb the side of a canyon that will have you wondering about a letter to the maker of your rental asking if their new cars ever stall and start to slide backward. But when you get here you may find it almost deserted if it’s a weekday early in the season, with hardly anyone in the campground and no cars on the loop road. You can park and walk out to this pile of rocks, climb up easily, and wait for night.

  Three large natural stone bridges cross over a curving canyon full of dark piñon green, red rock cliffs for a backdrop. To be where anyone else could be and yet to find yourself alone feels like discovering a secret. So you’re out here on this big rock, waiting for darkness to rise around you, shoes off, your feet bare to the breeze. And here’s what happens: The longer you stay, the darker it gets, and the darker it gets, the more sounds arise—crows and frogs in the canyon, crickets all around, and sounds that make you think of lions. Despite Kevin Poe’s having said that you’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a mountain lion, you can’t help but feel that tingle of fear, that fear of the unknown, that mystery. You like the feel of bare feet on warm desert rocks, the unexpected scent of night-blooming rose. You lie on your back with your hands across your eyes like blinders, making the world that much darker, then open them to reveal the sky. You do this again and again, and each time the sky is a little brighter, each time more peppered with stars. You stand and open your arms, savoring this window of darkness between the end of twilight and the waning moon’s rise. You feel the breeze on your skin and in your hair, hear the sounds from the canyon of crickets and crows and the steady throb of some creature unknown; you feel utterly surrounded by natural night, by fellow creatures for whom this is home, none of whom care if you’re here as long as you don’t bother them, all of whom lend their voice to the song this night sings, saying wel-come wel-come wel-come, belong.

  And here are two more, both personal, places I hope we all share.

  The first is memory, mine of the night in Morocco when I thought I’d stepped into a snowstorm. I thought, when I began this book, of trying to go back, of trying to find that location and maybe even that sky. But instead I decided to protect that memory, and to look for similar nights elsewhere. This is the place of our firsthand experience with night—beautiful, inspiring night—that I’ve heard about again and again from those I’ve met, and that forms the basis for any future concern about darkness. The opportunity to experience a real, dark night, especially when we are young, imprints on our minds a vision we never lose, one we might be inspired to regain.

  The second is a night called home, for me a lake in northern Minnesota. These days I’m only there during summers and sometimes at New Year’s. But this is the night that means the most to me, the one that moves me to act. If we are going to protect darkness, we almost certainly will do so because of the darkness we cherish or wish to see again in the place we call home. Just as Edward Abbey wrote, “This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places,” so I see the night at the lake. Even if it’s no longer pristine, it’s the most beautiful night I know, the night I want to protect most.

  And finally, one more, the dark place with which I’ll close, the darkest place I have visited, is one where I am not alone, and this makes all the difference. For the darkness I believe so valuable won’t be protected and restored only by solitary citizens going out into the night, but rather by places like this on nights like this—when dozens of children join dozens of adults under a breathtaking starry sky.

  Dan Duriscoe’s autumn 2005 report on Great Basin National Park reads like an astronomer’s dream: “Airglow has distinct blue green color, gegenschein easily seen but not the entire zodiacal band. Detail in the Milky Way in Cassiopeia substantial, M33 easy naked eye object, seen with direct vision. Light domes of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City are apparent but not brighter than Mars. Would be Bortle class 1 or 2 if not on high mountaintop.” In other words, except for a few spots on the horizon, the sky over Great Basin National Park is as dark today as it was before European settlement, so dark that a natural glow (“air glow”) hovers in the air, and the “opposite shine” lights the sky opposite to the sun. Even a nearby galaxy (M33) can be seen with the naked eye. The only drawbacks to this spectacular site are—as in Death Valley—the faint light domes of distant cities, its location at the summit of one of the park’s mountains, which, Duriscoe admits, makes it “very exposed, cold, windy”; and that “lack of oxygen,” he notes, “may be a handicap for visual observing.”

  Thankfully, the night after my drive here, playing with my headlights under the Milky Way, I stand not on a mountain peak but in the picnic area near the park’s visitors center, surrounded by two dozen amateur astronomers, their forty-plus telescopes, and most of the nearly three hundred other visitors who have come to the park for its annual Astronomy Festival. And what a diverse group we are—grandparents seated in folding chairs, mothers and fathers and excited kids, young backpackers in dirty boots and shorts. The park had its first festival in 2010 and in one night saw its visitation numbers spike. This year, it has expanded the festival to three nights, and still the campgrounds are full and the parking lots packed. Earlier, at a ranger-led program at sunset, many of these visitors gathered to read poems and sing songs inspired by the night, beginning with three small children singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and ending with a ranger-led sing-along of “Home on the Range,” though most of us could only mumble the little-known second verse:

  How often at night when the heavens are bright with the light from the glittering stars,

  Have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed if their glory exceeds that of ours.

  Now, not long after the program ended, standing “amazed” is what most of us are doing. To the south, west, and north the horizon ends with a close mountain’s rise. To the east, the Snake Valley runs for miles into Utah before reaching the mountains, where Jupiter hangs like an untethered balloon, lit from within, glowing as though lifted by coals. When a particularly bold shooting star passes overhead leaving a trail of smoke, a collective “Ooooohhhh” rises instinctively from those in the crowd who saw it, and good-natured curses from those who were looking the other way. It’s fair to say that few of us know one another, and yet fair as well to acknowledge a feeling of community here as we share the night’s experience. All around, those stars nearest the horizon are shimmering as though in a breeze and seem brighter, and even somehow larger, than they ever appear over the city. Their colors, like the red of Antares beating at the heart of the constellation Scorpius, are more evident than ever. “I’d forgotten how long it’s been since I’ve seen stars like this,” says a woman nearby. “I’ve never seen stars like this,” says her younger friend.

  I have seen stars like this, but not often. And I wonder tonight at how rare this experience has become. While writing this book, I have often wondered how hard anyone should have to work to simply see a truly starry sky, to simply know a truly dark night. In months of travel, getting outside every chance I could, I have had only a few nights like this one. The weather is cooperating, the moon is off doing other things, and there isn’t some strange natural disaster messing up
what everyone told me the sky was normally like. The calima in the Canaries was the worst example of this, but smoke from the largest forest fire in the recorded history of the Southwest clouded many of my nights, and more than one astronomy festival “star party” was crashed by weather everyone told me was odd. I have often felt as though in paying close attention to different levels of darkness I have been seeing a changing climate firsthand. As if “lights and ever more lights” weren’t enough, we also now have this.

  “What an incredible experience for the kids,” says my neighbor. Her friend replies, “Everybody wants their kids singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ and knowing what it means.” Remarkably, estimates are that eight out of every ten children born in America today will never know “what it means.” That is, 80 percent will never know a night dark enough that they can see the Milky Way. Standing under this clear desert sky, a statistic like this seems wholly implausible, as though reporting that eight of ten children will never speak or run or go outside. And yet, for every child out here tonight there are many thousands back in Las Vegas living swamped in light, without even the opportunity to “wonder what you are.” The words to the well-known children’s song come from a book of British nursery rhymes published in 1806, a time long before electric lights, a time when,

  Then a traveler in the dark,

  Thanks you for your tiny spark,

  He could not see which way to go,

  If you did not twinkle so.

  In a world where a star’s light could guide a traveler’s way, any child would be drawn to wonder. And not only children, but the rest of us, too. Henry Beston wrote, “When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze.” Tonight’s sky causes me to think that, even with what can sometimes seem such overwhelming obstacles in our future, Beston’s words still hold true: Given a chance to be touched by the beautiful mystery of night, there are few of us who won’t feel our spirit strengthened, our will resolved. The lights from Vegas may not stay in Vegas, but neither will an experience like this, an experience available still in this geography of night, and one that will return with us to wherever we call home.

  Beneath this Great Basin sky, that kind of inspiration comes easily, and thoughts instinctively turn to one’s place in the world, and the world’s place in the universe. This feeling, of tilting your head back until you feel enveloped by stars, of wonder and wondering, feels as primal as my experience last night driving to the park, that sensation of being thrown from the edge of the world.

  “There’s a name for that,” says Bill Fox, the festival’s keynote speaker and my fellow stargazer tonight. “When the horizon disappears and you feel like you’re falling into the stars, it’s called ‘celestial vaulting.’ ” Fox tells me of an artist named James Terrell who has already spent $23 million building a piece of art out of an extinct volcano’s crater outside Flagstaff with the explicit goal of creating for viewers the experience of “celestial vaulting.” And this experience of coming face-to-face with so many stars—when the sky opens as though a vault and we feel we are falling—is an experience that matters, Fox explains, because “if we never see the Milky Way or feel ourselves staring into the surrounding universe, how can we really know where we are? How will we know our place in the universe?”

  The author of more than a dozen books, Fox has long been fascinated by the way the human mind struggles to make sense of where we are, especially when faced with large spaces—the night sky included. Earlier, he’d told me of how American bomber pilots flying night missions in World War II found that for weeks after the end of their tour they could not focus on distant objects—the result of long hours of staring out into space. Their eyesight checked out fine, Fox explained, but their mind had lost the ability to make sense of what their eyes had been straining to focus on.

  Fox grew up in Reno in the midsixties when he could see the Milky Way from his front door, and the city cops who were initially suspicious of his front-yard telescope were soon coming regularly to check out his view of the heavens. In work that has focused on geographies like Nevada’s Great Basin, the Australian outback, and the white “deserts” of the Arctic and Antarctic, Fox has seen that view steadily fading, even, he has written, in the Arctic: “My Inuit friends have been saying for several years that the night is no longer as dark as it used to be. But no one believed them until the local meteorologist discovered that a layer of the Arctic atmosphere, recently warmed by global climate changes, was reflecting sunlight from far below the horizon. So even the polar night, the longest and most pure form of that black isotropy we find on earth, is threatened by the ubiquitous footprint of our species.”

  Fox winces as the headlights from a car leaving the visitors center flash across the picnic grounds, momentarily blinding us. After an hour of wandering from telescope to telescope, following green laser pointers wielded by silhouetted astronomers reeling off the Arabic names of the stars, and enough stargazing that our necks are growing tired, our eyes have grown used to the dark. “Makes you realize how bright those lights are,” Fox says, “lights that in the city we’re so used to that we don’t even notice.”

  I nod, thinking of the Wendell Berry poem I have carried with me while writing this book:

  To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

  To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

  and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

  and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

  How upside down this world where what was once a most common human experience has become most rare. Where a child might grow into adulthood without ever having seen the Milky Way and never feel as though lifted from Earth into surrounding stars. Where most of us go into the dark armed not only with “a light” but with so much light that we never know that the dark, too, blooms and sings.

  How right it feels to be in this place, standing with dozens of others, gazing at the Milky Way. How right it feels to know a true night sky, how right to know the dark. And as my companions and I head back toward the parking lot, back toward the light, I let the others walk ahead, and turn—one more time before I go inside, before the lights take my night vision—to see in that darkness our home in the universe, the rising ribbon of billions of stars sashed overhead, horizon to horizon, just as it always has been.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is something I have been looking forward to for a long time: the chance to say thank you in a public way to so many who have helped me write this book.

  Let me begin with lifelong friends, friends with whom I have discussed this work many times or who have influenced the writing in some way. First, to Thomas Becknell, whose thoughtful words have inspired me for the past ten years. To Emily Spiegelman, a friend since our days in New Mexico. To Ingrid Erickson, since Carleton. To Christina Robertson, in Reno. And to Tiffany (Threatt) Bourelle. To Randall Heath, for thirty years of conversations and laughs. To Marty Huenneke, for his essential company in Spain and a brogue that always brings a smile. To Eric Stottlemyer, from Reno to Winston-Salem and beyond. To Joshua Powell—we’ll always have “the gold,” my friend. And to David Swirnoff, whose wisdom and humor have kept me afloat from the days we were teenagers running around Lake of the Isles at midnight to his trusted reads of this manuscript.

  To longtime family friends who have supported me along the way: Marjorie Bjornstad in Milwaukee, Susan Flint and Michael Leirdahl in Minneapolis, Anne and Jack Ransom in Minneapolis, Mary and Jack von Gillern at Thunder Lake, Kathleen and Gene Scheffler in Golden Valley. Jeanne Harrie and Jerry Kleinsasser in Bakersfield.

  To Carly (Johnson) Lettero, Tom Schmiedlin, Michael Macicak and Carmen Retzlaff, Patrick Thomas, Michael Leville, Andrew Comfort, Alison Van Vort, Rachel and Joel Crabb, Nancy and Ron Crabb, Jim Barilla. To Scott Dunn, from editing my work in Albuquerque to housing
me while I replaced La Rosa. To Douglas Haynes for hospitality in Madison and emergency cleaning services the day the shaving cream exploded in the front seat.

  Friends from Carleton College days: Bardwell Smith, Wendy Crabb, Laura and John Gibson, Kristin Tollefson, Hanna Cooper, Laura (Kindig) Timali, Stephanie Satz and Jeremy Alden, Scott Dale.

  From Albuquerque: Bobbo McCormick, Gordon Schutte, Dan O’Brien, Bonnie Nuttall, Adam Ford, Cara O’Flannigan, Blake Minnerly, and so many Albuquerque ultimate friends. To Derek Sundquist (Go Gophers!), and in memory of Bailey. To Rachel (Armenta) Menke. And with special thanks to Greg Martin, a wonderful teacher of creative nonfiction.

  From Reno: Jen Hughes Westerman and Jim Westerman, Mike Branch, Cheryll Glotfelty, Chris Coake, Heather Krebs, Lisa Fleck, Kyle Ferrari, Amy Poetschat, Rich and Jackie Starkweather, Jim Frost, Matt and Katie Anderson, Sudeep Chandra, Megan Kuster, Leslie Wolcott, Dawn Hanseder, Justin Gifford, Dan Montero, and all my friends at Reno Ultimate. To 535 Toiyabe Street, the Bibo Coffee Company, and the trails behind Patagonia.

  Special thanks to Scott Slovic for his advice, ideas, and unfailing optimism.

  I am thankful to have spent three years teaching at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, where I worked with an extraordinary group of faculty that included Erica Hannickel, Paul Schue, Jason Terry, Michele Small, Tim Ziegenhagen, Tim Doyle, Elizabeth Andre, Alan Brew, and Grant Herman. What would life be like without my knowing Cynthia Belmont? I cannot imagine. David Saetre is a man whose friendship I treasure. Mary Rehwald helped make 715 Ellis Avenue feel like home. I am honored to call a true international man of mystery, Dr. Rajat Panwar, my friend.

  For two years at Wake Forest University it was my pleasure to work with many fine colleagues, including Jessica Richard, Dean Franco, Erica Still, Rian Bowie, Eric Wilson, Scott Klein, Ryan Shirey, Collin Craig, Anne Boyle, Laura Aull, John McNally, Grace Wetzel, Patrick Moran, Rachel Deagman, Mary DeShazer, Cynthia Gendrich, and Phoebe Zerwick. Thanks to Kendall Tarte for making an important call to Paris on my behalf, and to Bill O’Connor for showing me his moth collection. Special thanks to Miles Silman for including me in his work with the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. To Erin Branch and Lukas Brun in Chapel Hill, thank you for the wonderful dinners. To Omaar Hena and Gretchen Stevens, I will not soon forget the text that simply said (and said it all), “Do you prefer salmon or filet mignon?” and signaled another night of great food and wine on the back deck. To Abi Flynn, for indulging my endless enjoyment of her English accent and sharp wit.