We give thanks to the Stars who are spread across the sky like jewelry. We see them at night, helping the Moon to light the darkness and bringing dew to the gardens and growing things. When we travel at night, they guide us home. With our minds gathered as one, we send greetings and thanks to all the Stars.
— From the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address
I was on the mountain last night, descending in the dark. The dark line of the woods on both sides created a sense of being vulnerable, watched. The air was soft, a March night air without the bite of winter. The wind was up and the clouds scudded quickly toward the north, over the north ridge of the peaks where the kachinas live. Every now and then a bright light shone from the ridge and the snow around me seemed to turn to white ash—an old reminder of an explosive history, a volcano’s history.
The night sky revealed itself in pieces, the clouds opening to show the stars and closing again like a hand hiding silver coins. Orion the huntsman lives to the south. He walks across the sky from east to west, following the tracks of rabbits. A quiver of arrows hangs from his belt and in his hands the starry bow. He has a swimmer’s shoulders. His feet are planted in the mountain. The clouds shift and lower so I can no longer see him, but I can feel his hunting instinct alive in the dark air. I suddenly feel like all prey must: that to live on the earth is a certainty measurable only breath by breath. The tracks I leave behind in the snow are swept clean in the heave of a second.
Other nights I’ve stood by water, or slept on it in a boat tied up to shore. Canyons shape the lens. For hours in the dark the movie rolls overhead, a long thin ribbon of film shown frame by frame. One April night on the San Juan after Ellen Meloy’s death, the northern lights set sail on a midnight sky—unheard of at that latitude and time of year. Dark pink with bolts of orange leaping upward like visible music. Ellen, hello, I said. It was the river she loved the most and nothing else—the time and place of her appearance—mattered.
Here’s a picture: My father at the stern of a hired boat throwing bread to the gulls. Caribbean waters Windex blue, brown-headed Laughing Gulls with a habit of shrieking. Dad tossing whole English muffins their way while the sun settles low, followed quickly by a starry dark. The constellations laid out above like scattered breadcrumbs, random and nameless. There is nothing familiar to me in the sky of the southern hemisphere. I have no anchorage, no mooring, no harbor there where the night sky is not mine. How often I have snapped awake on a beach or in a rocking boat on a river in my own part of the planet and told time by the position of the stars and felt at rights. Or watched a film of cloud smother the moon and felt the shift in weather. Or sensed the river below and the river above as one. They say we can foretell the time and place of our death if we know how to read the sky’s prophecies. I don’t care to learn this art. I don’t care to know.
My father died in January, a bitter night, the night after a flock of birds disabled US Airways flight 1549 and forced a landing in the Hudson River. My mother died in the evening, around supper time, in December. She parted the curtains of early dark and slipped out. She could be unsure in the daylit world, uneasy in finding her earthly way. It was said by some she couldn’t find her way out of a hatbox. But give her the stars and she was flawless. Celestial navigation was as natural to her as the next breath. Find Polaris, she’d say. That was our first waypoint. Now Betelgeuse, Altair, Deneb, Vega, then she’d rattle off the planets that shone early and late in our northern sky.
She was a sailor and brought us up to know the things of the sea. Tides, wind, the trim of a sail. And she taught us to find the horizon, to memorize the constellations, to smell land before we saw it and to welcome errant land birds to the rigging where they’d shiver with exhaustion. After she died, among her things I found an old wooden box, teak with a simple latch. Inside, it was padded with blue velvet, cushioning an instrument I had seen in her hands many times before: her sextant. It looked like a cross between a telescope and a protractor. She was good with numbers, good at math, and before GPS became a household word she’d be up on deck at night, sighting Polaris and its distance to the horizon, then by magic she’d know where we were in the world when all around us the world looked to my eyes like a rolling dark sea.
One night camped out on the Esplanade I looked up into the liquid darkness and felt the heaviness of drowning. The luminescent plankton of stars winked on and off above me, and I imagined propelling myself upward, swimming to the surface of the sea in which my body now floated, airless, breathless, and most of all timeless. The heaviness of drowning gave way to the lightness of dying. There was no surface, after all, no separation of this state and that, of breath and no breath. Time was replaced by knowledge. The stars were commas and semicolons in a layered universe that eluded the prison of language. It was a wild night. It felt like my first night on earth, my first night living within the curvaceous bounds of a question mark. The sky offers us this.
One point seven five billion years below the rim, and we know well enough to start early. As we pass by in the dark the sacra datura at the mouth of the first side canyon are blooming. I stop and speak to them, inform them of their beauty, as if they were just created, newly painted and placed there by Georgia O’Keeffe moments ago. Along the way we watch for desert four o’clocks and evening primrose—also creatures of the night. June. The heat by day is well over 100, but time is generous now in the cool dark. The sky tips open as we climb. Sometimes it’s no wider than the width of the trail; other times it unfolds above the rattling leaves of the cottonwoods to show us Vulpecula, the little fox to the north, Lupus, the wolf to the south, Canis Major and Minor, Orion’s hunting dogs. And on this earth, a band of hungry coyotes yip their frenzied predator language up high in the Horn Creek drainage.
Years ago I joined a band of gringos, scientists interested in the interspecies colonies that grew up in pockets in the volcanic desert environment of the Pinacates, just north of Puerto Peñasco. Elephant tree, senita cactus, brittlebush, cholla, creosote bush. A plant started out solo then gained friends as it drew the sparse rainfall to it, creating moisture and shade and eventually an intimate nursery at its feet. The elephant tree was named for its gray pachydermic bark. When wounded it oozed a thick reddish sap like its cousin frankincense. It was smooth and patriarchal and while it seldom grew larger than bush size, its thick limbs—each one a trunk of its own—stretched out to create a welcoming shade. An invitation. The head scientist, a man called Guy, studied that invitation and the guests that arrived because of it. We were there with tape measures and soil testers, stubby pencils and waterproof notebooks to help gather data and drink some excellent tequila and fall in love with that corner of the desert. Why the notebooks were waterproof I have no idea.
Our first night out in that splendid corner of the Sonora was not quiet. The desert birds and mammals came alive in the cool of night. I came alive too and walked away from camp to be in that greater energy. What I saw surprised me; I had missed it by daylight. The lava that covers most of the Pinacates shone bright black in the moonlight but here and there the marks of passage were clearly visible. These were old pathways across the lava, old human pathways. In the morning I asked Guy about it and he said the trails, invisible by day, needed only be visible at night for that was when the people traveled. Of course. The cool of night. By moon and starlight. The scuff marks of many feet led people where they wanted to go. Night walkers adapted to the desert. Generations of night walkers walking by the light of the Swan, the Sea- goat, the Great Bear.
By the time summer comes, Orion will have chased his rabbits below the horizon and cantankerous Scorpio will scuttle upward into the southern sky. A night on the ridge of the mountain will give the long view in the long light, profiles of cinder hills and the reclining poses of Kendrick, Sitgreaves, Bill Williams—masculine names under which the old names, the native names, the sacred names lie waiting: Dook’o’oosłííd, Gleaming Summit, Abalone Shell Mountain; Nuvátukya’ovi, Place-of-snow-on-the-very-top; Wii Hagnbaja’, Moon Mountain, Snowy Mountain; Sunha:kwin K’yabachu Yalanne, Highest Mountain to the West. A rush of wind and the sky darkens as if movement is the instigator of true night. Clouds tearing and mending. Behind them the shreds of constellations we know in whole pieces because where we live we have darkness enough to bring forth light.
Margaret Erhart’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005. Her commentaries have aired on NPR. She won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was a finalist for an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona. You can find her at www.margareterhart.com