CHAPTER 1
Dark Skies
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
SARAH WILLIAMS
THE INTERNATIONAL DARK-SKY ASSOCIATION is a group dedicated to the preservation of our globe's night sky. It works to reduce light pollution, solely for the purpose of allowing us to gaze into the "extraordinary wonders of the nighttime sky." One of the many places set aside as a dark-sky region is Death Valley. Though Los Angeles and Death Valley are only a four-hour drive apart, the contrast is so remarkable you'd think there were two different skies.
In the city, with all the competing lights, you may be able to pick out only a handful of stars overhead. In Death Valley, it's another world. The sky is smudged with bands of silver-white; dazzling twinkles radiate from millions of miles away. It is another sky, yet the same one. The dark is what allows you to see.
My first memory of the wonders that the dark sky holds is from when I was seven years old. It was the first summer of many that my mom and dad and I vacationed in the White Mountains of Arizona. Tucked against the New Mexico border, at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet, this area was dazzling. Green meadows between tall peaks, plunging river canyons, purple wildflowers, and German brown trout in the streams.
We stayed at the Sprucedale Guest Ranch, a family-owned "guest dude ranch." Actually, it was a working cattle ranch, and in the summer they supplemented their income by opening their doors to guests. We stayed in handmade log cabins that ran electricity for two hours in the morning and a few more at night. Meals were in the ranch house—unbelievable homemade, fresh creations—and the daily activities were fishing, hiking, and horseback riding. The horseback riding included finding and driving in the cattle that were feeding at the higher elevations. A couple of times during the week, in the afternoons, we were in the corral, roping and branding the calves.
The first night we stayed there, we were sitting on the front porch of our cabin. As my eyes adjusted to the dark sky, I couldn't quite comprehend what I was seeing. My dad, noticing the quizzical look on my face, said, "That's the Milky Way."
For the next few minutes we alternated between awe-filled silence and conversation as he explained to me the vast number of heavenly bodies in the sky that in LA had gone unseen.
He pointed out tiny dots of light that when connected (at least by the imagination) made up the outlines of mythological creatures the ancients had seen and named. He told me about the navigational abilities these stars and planets had given to the Polynesians, the Vikings, and sailors from many lands since. He also talked about our place in all of this vastness. Small but connected.
Stories, direction, place—all above my head, but largely unseen until it was dark. Very dark.
It took time for my eyes to adjust, to be able to see in the dark. When there is a low-light condition, the pupils automatically dilate in order to let in more light. It's like taking your first step into a dark movie theater and trying to find a seat. It's so dark you're not sure there even are seats. But just a minute or so later, with time and adjustment, you see what you could not see before.
* * *
When I was a little girl my parents split up. Not an uncommon story, you'd think, but this was in the early 1960s. I was, quite literally, the only kid in my elementary school whose parents were going through a divorce. I know, because occasionally I heard teachers whispering to one another as I walked down the hallways, "That's her; she's the one." There was no unkind tone—it was just such an anomaly.
I was in third grade, eight years old. Some of my strongest and most painful memories from that time were the fights before they split. The yelling was awful, and I would alternate between trying to push my way between them to get them to stop and running to the den and turning the television volume up loud enough to drown out the noise. The noise terrified me because when it went on long enough, one of them would leave.
One parent would drive away in the car, and the other, probably exhausted from the ordeal, would collapse into bed. But that's not where I went. I crawled onto the kitchen counter and peered through the curtains, watching and waiting for the parent who had left to come back.
It's remarkable how vivid that experience is to this day. My recall, not always my strongest suit, is impeccable when it comes to those evenings. I can still feel the cold turquoise counter tiles on my shins. I can picture the fabric of the kitchen curtains with their teakettle design. The thick brass hooks on the curtains made a peculiar sound against the rod when I pushed them aside, searching for the familiar headlights that would mean my mom or dad was home.
When I saw the car pulling into our one-lane driveway, I would return the curtains to their closed position and run to my bed, pretending to be asleep and listening for the turn of the kitchen door. Once the parent who had driven away was back, I felt such a strong relief that sleep would overtake me.
Interestingly, my parents ended up reconciling a year later, and until the day my father died in 1990, they were together. But it took me years of counseling, talking through things with friends, and wrestling with God to understand the full impact all of this had on me. There were long seasons, especially through high school and college, when I found it laughable that it had affected me at all. Perhaps those years of denial explain why it took so long before this issue bubbled to the surface and I was finally forced to look at it.
There's one other thing I remember from this time. An occasional, faint whisper. Not even a whisper, really—more a soul presence. Every once in a while, on that cold tile counter, along with the terror I felt, there was an accompanying presence—a sense that I was not as alone as it seemed. The small awareness that I was not on my own.
* * *
In Hebrew, the word psalm means "book of praise." The problem is, once you open the book of Psalms, you realize that well over half of the chapters are psalms of lament. Hardly truth in advertising ...
So the one book of the Bible that invites us into its pages by promising birds chirping and flowers blooming is filled with words like despair, alone, wicked, and loathing. Far more plentiful than the verses that remind us to rejoice and praise are those that admit to distance from and doubts about God.
Imagine if your responsive reading in...
