Spectra
Douglas Schnitzspahn
This is how you read the sky. Start with the three stars of the Summer Triangle—Vega, Altair, Deneb—and you can find three constellations: Lyra, the faint lyre; Aquila, the soaring Roman eagle; and Cygnus the swan, spreading his wings across the Milky Way. Trace the giant “W” of Cassiopeia—that heartless queen who threw her daughter to a sea monster—and, suspended below her, you’ll find Perseus—the swashbuckler who rescued her from its jaws. Focus on the form of Perseus, with his triangular head of three dim stars, and he will lead you to Andromeda—the knockout daughter herself—a reclining line of a constellation falling off to her hero’s left. Andromeda, in turn, shares the arc of her body with one of the long wings of Pegasus, the flying horse. Pegasus is a giant square of a constellation, always hanging by the horizon early on a summer night. It was Pegasus who Perseus rode to Andromeda’s rescue, Pegasus who swooped both of them off into the sky.
Look farther. If you find the third star of Andromeda’s body, along that stellar wing she shares with her hero’s mount, if you can find the point where her solar plexus would widen into her belly, right below that heavenly flesh, there is the Andromeda galaxy, a spiral island of stars not very different from our own, but too distant to properly comprehend. To the naked eye, it looks like a faint star that someone smudged with a thumb. It is blurred; the light reaching us now from that out-of-focus galaxy began traveling before we measured time.
This is my nightly ritual: learning the constellations, scanning the sky from the warmth of my sleeping bag. I can’t stand the confinement of a tent. I need the constellations to think. Spread over the night, these stick-figure representations of heroes and galactic distances loom above me. When I gaze up, I’m within them, smudging my own story, my own sense of space measured in time, before I’m asleep.
Years ago, I lived in Boston, and the stars lay hidden behind the purple glow of city nights. I only knew Orion, the hunter, his outline persevering through all the indirect luminescence of Back Bay brownstones and a thousand headlights headed into the heart of the city. Now, I’m out here in Montana working trail crew for the Forest Service, building a bridge across a stream called Ruby Creek. Everyday we pound nails and strip bark off logs. We excavate the stream banks and construct a cribbing that will hold the bridge in place, anchoring it down with piles of boulders and gravel fill. At night, I teach myself how to read the sky.
Back in Boston, I used to drink all night until I blacked out. Here, starlight seeps into my dreams. Reading the night sky is a matter of orientation, of being so sure of one single point that you can find it despite the sidereal machinations of the heavens. Then you move out. Or you can learn stories: memorize one constellation, one story, each night, then remember the constellation next to it. Soon, you fill up the sky, and tell time by the rising and setting of myths on the horizon.
When I was a kid, my Dad would read Good Night Moon to me at bedtime. It made sense to speak to the sky, to be tucked in by it. I was never afraid of the vastness of space. It gave me comfort to lie in bed and imagine my vision panning out so that the earth morphed to a marble, the moon filled up the frame and clouds of nebulous gas gave way to nothingness. I was soothed by the geeky voice of the televised astronomer Carl Sagan repeating “billions and billions” over and over again to give me a feel for cosmic sizes and ages. Not being able to comprehend a number or distance made it more comforting.
Eyes peeled on the night sky and spurred on by Sagan, I asked my Dad to explain why the moon goes through its cycles. Grab a basketball, a softball, and a flashlight from our garage, he said, I’ll show you. In our driveway, he created a model of the earth (the basketball), the moon (the softball), and the sun (the flashlight), so that I could visualize down here how everything worked up there. He held the sun and I was gravitational force, spinning the softball in orbit and observing the play of light. We woke up before dawn and watched the disc of the full moon drop under the horizon just as the sun rose. I thought it was a once in a lifetime occurrence, a miracle along the lines of a total eclipse. Nah, my Dad said, that happens every month. It’s just that if you don’t look for it, you won’t notice.
When you can watch the moon and stars every night you understand how the earth rotates, how the seasons change while the constellations dip under and over the horizon. You see time as a collection of nights within a single moment, an arc. You understand why calculus envisions events in space and time as the infinite difference in one change over another. Nothing is static, but there are some things you can predict. After he showed me his flashlight model of the solar system my Dad tousled my hair and said study hard kid you don’t want to grow up to be a ditch digger. And here I am on Ruby Creek, building a cribbing in the stream bank for the bridge, swinging a Pulaski into the dirt day in and out.
