For my twelfth birthday, my father bought me a telescope through which I could see the rings on Saturn. I would stand in the backyard and peer into the lens, tapping the machine's electronic focus button until each band of dust stood out as though etched in the graphite of the night sky, and I would count the tiny dots of the gas giant's moons as they danced in and out of those precise artist's lines. I could see the moons of Jupiter, too, and the dark red maw of the Red Spot, and on clear nights I could turn the North Star from a pinprick radiance to a perfect, tiny disk, flat and round like a coin frozen in a crystalline pool.
I once witnessed a lunar eclipse through that telescope. Alerted to the impending excitement by the weather page of our local paper, my dad and I fixed thermoses of hot cocoa and trooped out into a miraculously clear October night to watch our presumptuous little planet starve its only satellite crater by crater for light. I remember peering through the telescope's lens before the eclipse began, absorbed in the revelation of sharp lunographic distinctions. I traced the outline of dusty craters, followed the path of a dry, jagged ridge, until my dad finally laid his hands on my shoulders and drew me backward. I looked up with weak naked eyes and saw the disc of the moon half-gone. Dad smiled at my horrified expression and sat me down in the grass, leaving my birthday present sagging a little in the early dew, and I fell asleep on his shoulder before the moon returned. I woke up in my bed feeling like the morning after Christmas, but without the smell of wrapping paper on my fingers.
Now, ten years later, I have left my first automotive love, a gold Toyota pickup truck called Obie, at a notch in the Sierra crest and gone seeking my moon.
I did not understand, when I patted Obie's bumper and shoved the car keys into a deep pocket in my pack, that I had set out with such a mission. Nor did I understand that, unless you enjoy the taste of adrenaline on your tongue and the harsh, shallow breath of your own fragility whispering in your ears, you should not leave your car in the windswept parking lot of a nine thousand foot mountain pass and set off up an eleven thousand foot ridge just as the August sun is sinking into wisps of red cloud in the west. I find adrenaline briefly satisfying but ultimately bitter and destabilizing, like hard liquor or a shouting match. And when my fragility attempts to start a conversation, I generally attempt to slap it back across the room.
The setting sun is beautiful. The whole western sky glows with its wrenching farewell, setting the Sierra granite afire at my feet and pouring liquid garnet through the needles of scattered stubborn scrub pines. The air on the ridgecrest whips downslope, shivering, carrying garnet-crusted pine needles in its wake. The needles stick in my hair and the wind in my mouth tastes of snow.
The setting sun is beautiful. I just wish it wouldn't set so fast.
I am waiting for the trail to drop off the crest and descend the other side of the ridge. Up here, waiting loses all connotations of passivity. Waiting demands the single-minded focus of a chef who waits for a stirred sauce to thicken, the passionate faith of the heartbroken and crippled who wait for their wounds to heal. Waiting means running, at as full a tilt as I can manage with a pack, along a faint strip of level ground cut into the rocky slope, with the setting sun at my back and the wind sending all my hair straight out from the side of my head like a proud flag. Chips of Sierra granite skid under my shoes. Under the flat glow of the aging sunlight, the trail and the rocks and the trees all begin to blend to an equal shade of red, so to that I feel as though I am climbing a single unremarkable tongue of flame to the crackling apex of a breathtaking inferno.
I stop only once. Ridiculously, I stop to photograph the setting sun. The wind pushes me off the trail, and I have to plant my feet wide apart, like a football player taking a tackle, to stay upright while I steady the camera against my chest. I take ten shots, each a little darker than the last. The last image shows only a strip of fire against a black background. I have to use all ten of my icy fingers, and my numb, chapped lips, to close the zipper on the camera case.
As I push forward, kicking against the deep current of wind, I squeeze my right hiking pole, hard, and then the left, to bring the feeling back to my hands. Right fist, left fist. Right foot, left foot. The red of the rocks and the trees and the black of the sky all soak into the trail and spill out again. i lose track of my tongue of flame and move forward on trust and instinct alone.
Finally, the weathered gray face of a Forest Service trail sign looms up out of the darkness in front of me. I pull out my headlamp, but even with its help I can't make out the writing on the lonely wooden post. One branch of trail goes right and down, the other left and up. I turn right. The lower trail winds a little and then drops, and I follow, leaving the last of the sunset licking the ridgetop above me.
Before, I waited for the trail to drop; now, I wait for it to flatten. The first downhill steps are steep, and I fall on my butt and hands and yell at myself to please be more careful, and I lose the thin gray line of trail amidst the gray of rock and scrub as it winds and switchbacks. I think I feel blood trickling into my sock and my glove, but I cannot see it and so pretend that it isn't there. I wave the headlamp in an arc in front of me, looking for flatter places in the steep slope, patches where the rock looks broken and disturbed and free of the few small plants that grow this high, looking for the distinctions and interruptions and subtle consistencies that signal human interference in smooth chaos. But the narrow beam of the lamp shows the landscape in piecemeal fashion, bits of dialogue all out of context, and without hearing the background noise unbroken I have no means to pick out the words.
So I translate the language of the trail directly and painstakingly, one three-foot syllable at a time, until I have descended into a world of grass and trees, where the words of the trail contrast sharply with those of the landscape and I can follow both by the music of the dialect alone.
And now I can look up, and I can notice a milky glow all along the eastern horizon, like a weak and washed-out sunrise. I think of photos I have seen of the Northern Lights, photos taken far from California. I watch as the glow brightens, gathering itself into a brimming pool at the center of the sky. I watch the moon rise so fast I can taste it, until my shadow stretches behind me into the west, until every crease in the ground at my feet shouts its name into the air. The crystal granite boulders scattered in the grass seize the light and fling it through the branches of the pines. Soaked in gossamer phosphorescence, I feel reverence rise rich and scalding in my throat, seeping into my blood and my heart and my fingertips until I know I cannot contain so much. I drop everything and raise the camera, and in a single desperate motion close my warm hand over the shutter. The photo captures only the moon, a fuzzy alien globe bobbing in a sea of darkness, and nothing else. I tip my head back and gaze through salty tears upon a million scattered stars.
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