Picture if you will a huge jumble of rocks as if strewn about by the giant hands of a Titan, their granite greyness partially covered in red mud and lichen. Hardy trees with gnarled roots and wide spreading branches hang onto small patches of soil. These trees seem to sprout from the rock like giant mushrooms. The roads in this place weave around immovable rock and sink further into the spongy ground with each passing year. Some days the air is so thick with flying insects that oft times they become additional, though unwanted, protein to the local diet.
This is where I was born.
I’ve hiked, biked, and run through kilometers of the dense forests surrounding this small hamlet hidden in the wilds of Northwestern Ontario. I know the bush around town better than the actual roads and buildings. I recall many times standing on hills overlooking this town built on a swamp, while the breezes of summer brought the bouquet of wildflowers and pine and while the storms of winter brought frostbite and the crisp scent of snow.
Fall is my favourite season of the year; the temperatures are perfect for outdoor activities, the nights are cool and ideal for sleeping, and the absence of crawling, stinging, biting, tormenting insects makes it a little bit of paradise on earth.
I am a stranger now, a visitor from afar. I am lying on a thick, soft, spongy bed of moss with my nephew, watching the stars as they wheel across the sky. “Jupiter at ten o’clock, over that spruce with the wonky branch,” I say to him.
He snaps open the binocular case. I hear the glasses scrape across the inside fabric of the case as he fiddles with it in the dark.
“I see four moons,” he says.
I can tell from his voice, the little catch after “four,” just how excited he is. “The Jupiter system reminds me of the solar system,” I say, trying out my museum curator voice.
“Yes,” he whispers. Then uncharacteristically for him, “Thank you.”
I shift on the mossy bed and pull out a small twig that is trying to impale my flesh. “Mars will be out in about a half hour,” I say. “It isn’t as cool.”
He doesn’t reply; he is barely breathing as he stares through his binoculars at the planet I’ve revealed to him. I close my eyes and picture them in my mind: bright little pinpoints of light, two moons on either side of a bright disk. I can almost feel the frigid air of winter burning my nose and frosting my hair on the night that my dad showed me this same sight. “Don’t breathe on the telescope,” he warns me for about the twentieth time.
I hold my breath and watch until the earth’s rotation takes the image out of the view finder. “Dad, do you think there are Jupiter-terrians looking back at us?” I ask.
“No,” he chuckles. “Jupiter is a huge planet with gravity that would crush anything on its surface,” he explains. I’m disappointed. The idea of watching a planet while someone is looking back at me is a bit exciting.
Astronomy took on a whole new meaning for me that night. It became real. It was no longer just a story in a book, or pretty cut-out planets revolving around our heads in class. It was an honest-to-goodness real deal, where small moons spin around planets, where planets revolve around the sun, where the sun rotates around the Milk Way, and where the Milky Way travels through space, where no man has gone before. I was hooked, even if there weren’t any Jupiter-terrians hanging out with their dads watching me watching them.
My life has been a little like that with every new experience. Running my hands over the grey stones of Hadrian’s Wall made history a reality. Roman soldiers suddenly became living, breathing, thinking human beings to me. I was standing where thousands of years ago men and women carefully placed stones to build a wall in the wilds of Northern Britannia. Why did they do it? What did it look like in its heyday? I was hooked.
Later, while taking a calculus course in university and plotting out bell curves, I finally get it: I still don’t like calculus but I get the science behind it. I envy the prof the excitement he derives from his formulas. I run into him at a seminar some time later and when the topic comes up I admit I still have never used a single one of his formulas in my daily life. He beams, not in the slightest perturbed by my admission.
“Why do you love it so much?” I ask.
“Because the numbers never lie,” he explains. “You might hate them, you may not understand them, but they always tell you the truth,” he says looking wistful. “What else can you say that about in this life?”
“Look, a shooting star!” my nephew exclaims.
I open my eyes but I’ve already missed it. “Did you make a wish?” I ask.
He doesn’t reply so I know he did. You aren’t supposed to tell anyone your wish or it won’t come true. I close my eyes and wish for another one.
Image Credit
“Telescope: Sunset over the Bodensee, Begenz, Aistria” by JMC Photos. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.
I really liked this one. Very evocative, picturesque. I was taken back to lying on the grass outside my house with my Mom doing almost the exact same thing. She wanted to shoot out the local (and only) streetlight with her bow and arrow to make it darker, but the sky sure came alive for me and I devoured every book we had (and thumbed my poor small guidebook to utter demise) for many years afterwards.
That sounds a lot warmer then when dad had his telescope set up. I always associate looking at stars and planets with winter and -20. Nevertheless, it was amazing, magical, and wonderful. Thanks for the kind words.