Stars Over Manistee

Rarely do you regret letting a new mother sleep, but I regretted it that night, when the nine-month-old was up at three a.m., crying in the tent, after my wife had hiked miles in the mud and mosquitoes down along the Manistee River. I took the wailing girl out for a walk in the dark to let mom sleep.

A few months before we'd slipped out of the house at a similar hour to sneak into a county park and watch the Perseids from a high point where the sky was biggest. We didn't know many constellations, certainly not Perseus, and it was all the harder to find in the eternal glow of downtown, of which our hilltop had an unwittingly excellent view. We didn't see a single shooting star. We abandoned the quest when the toddler fell and scraped her nose and lip and started wailing in a closed park operated by the sheriff's department. After that, we figured we'd better learn some constellations.

I knew one or two. The Big Dipper, obviously, and the Little Dipper. But I didn't yet know you can use the Big Dipper as a clock, turning in the night sky on an unmarked 24-hour dial. In winter we could spot Orion's belt, but didn't know the sword hanging from the belt always points south. At the opposite solstice we could trace the Summer Triangle, and if we were lucky pick out Cygnus winging along the Milky Way. But we were never that lucky. Not so close to the Eternal Glow, anyway.

Once, years later, when the night-wailer was four, we crossed into Wyoming after dark and stopped in a cow-crossing to change her into pajamas, and when she looked at the sky she exclaimed, "Wow! There must be a hundred stars!" Yes, but the more there were, the harder it was to pick out constellations. Even with an app on my phone which knew the exact time and longitude and latitude and what direction it was pointing, I still couldn't tell if the star on the screen was the same as the one in the sky.

I didn't have the phone or the app that night backpacking in the national forest, down at the river bottom, carrying a disconsolate toddler across my arms. The moon had set, and the Eternal Glow was a hundred and fifty miles away. The black sky was salted with stars. Forget constellations. I couldn't pinpoint any celestial landmarks. There were too many.

I should have woken my wife to share it. You can sleep when you're dead. But you only glimpse stars like sea-foam once in a lifetime. Then you can die.