When I was a boy, and before I knew of poetry and women and wine, I studied the night sky with my dog-eared copy of “Norton’s Star Atlas.”
I would sit on the roof of my family’s one-story ranch-style house in Phoenix on hot summer nights when the shingles were still warm from the heat of the day, and the stars would shine bright overhead in the cloud-free dry desert sky, and on certain nights when there was no moon, I would just barely trace the back of the Universe in the dual bands of the Milky Way that stretched like so much powdered sugar from horizon-to-horizon.
And I had a passion for the planet Mars.
During a winter sometime in the mid-1970s, I begin reading “The Martian Chronicles” and dreamed of rocketing to Mars, and living on the slopes of Olympus Mons in a friendly little thing that would sustain life (this was the 70s after all with the L5 Society and so on, and so forth). Or gliding the cold water of the canals on a titanium catamaran with perhaps a friendly young Martian lady with big eyes who wore a silvery toga-type shift the would move as she moved, and I would look up in the dark Martian sky and see the Earth as a dot in space and know the true meaning of insignificance.
As luck would have it, the spring of one year in the 1970s brought the promise of a trip to Flagstaff and Lowell Observatory. So one weekend, my father, my sister, my brother, and I left the heat of Phoenix and followed Interstate 17 up onto the high Mogollon Rim and made the pilgrimage to Flagstaff.
And Mars.
Once arrived, I impatiently waited for night to come as we toured Mars Hill. For on this night, we would be able to look through the Clark Refractor, the very telescope Perceval used! The night grew cold and the wind rushed through the pines on the hill and the stars were brighter than I’d ever seen them and I thumbed through my star atlas with my flashlight covered in an Oroweat bread wrapper (a 100% whole wheat one, if memory serves) so my eyes would remain dilated, but there was no need.
I knew the sky. I saw in constellation vision.
And then, the old astronomer ushered us into the telescope building, and I saw the long tube of the Clark Refractor and the ginormous counterweight and the high wooden shutters that where open to a slit from which through the telescope one might view the entirety of the Universe on a cold night when the stars are twinkle-less.
The astronomer talked to the small assembly of people that included us, and shared stories of the immensity of the skies and how you only are seeing a small slice with a telescope and how Perceval Lowell sat at night for hours on the hard wooden seat that could be raised and lowered in concurrence with the position of the telescope.
I patiently awaited my turn (a sudden calm had come over me) at the eyepiece, and when it arrived, I felt small under the refractor’s enormous metal tube that dominated all above me and I tentatively put my hand on the telescope near the eyepiece and the metal was cold and I lowered my eye to the glass and saw Saturn and its wonderful rings, and I knew I was changed, somehow.
Then, we piled into the old VW bus and headed down off of the Rim in the dark of night and felt the heat rise and watched the stars fade as we neared Phoenix.
Early this morning, the pre-dawn sky was clear except for a few high wispy white clouds. The Western Sky was black and littered with the brighter stars while in the east, the coming sun awaited.
As I stood in the driveway and from the forest park across the road, I heard the familiar rush of wind through the pines, a sound that is just right to invoke a memory, and I wonder back up the Mars Hill of the 70s when I was young and impressionable, and, for a brief moment, the Universe was mine again.
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