When Will I see the Stars Again?
Stargazing in the Moab Desert & Flirting with the Milky Way
I will always be a city girl. (DC, New York, Chicago…And we will see where I end up next… 😘) But it is very easy to lose scope of everything on your daily commute with AirPods corking you up, keeping you distant and dissociated.
Its very easy to never look up.
And even if you do, Chicago has such a thick reflection of light pollution blocking out any experience you could have one-on-one with the cosmos. I apologize in advance for getting all “Neil DeGrasse Tyson” on you, but you can’t make direct, flirty eye contact with the Milky Way and come back the same person.
A group of me and 8 of my closest girlfriends congregated from all over the country one August morning in Denver. We lounged in the sleepy mountains for a couple of days sampling the local, much-cheaper-than-Chicago weed before our big trek to the Moab Desert in Utah. We could have just as easily landed in Salt Lake City and made it a >3hour commute, but it’s all about the journey and taking the extended scenic route, right?
On the road, the landscapes transformed from the familiar Colorado mountain ranges slowly morphing into a terrain closer to what I imagine the Mars Rover spends its lonely days hobbling over. We raced across states to make our reservation time at Arches National park. We made it with 8minutes to spare before they stopped letting cars in.
It was meant to be!
I stepped out of the car and stretched my cramped, long legs and I was first hit with the acoustics. It was quiet. (Downtown Chicago is never quiet.) This particular kind of quiet was not about the absence of noise, but the presence of stillness. I looked out and my brain had a little bit of an issue absorbing the landscape I was consuming was real. So beautiful and deeply surreal.
I saw canyons. I saw arches. I saw lightning strike so close at Bryce Canyon that the electricity in the air made our hair stand on end as if we were touching a Tesla Coil. I saw the “Purple Mountains Majesty” near Canyonlands and can confirm they are really, very literally purple. Not vaguely purple if you squint at it sideways, but when the sunset hits them just right, they are vibrant, neon sign purple. An iPhone camera could never do the hue justice, but, yes, that old song is quite accurate.
What I was hit with most was initially the physical expansiveness of it all, but when I searched a little further, it was more about what the size represented. I can comprehend mass, but it is much harder to wrap my mind around age. You can distinctly see the colorful ribbons of millions of years of the wind and rain molding the earth into these structures.
At one of our stops, we saw ancient petroglyphs, (cave drawings, essentially), dating back thousands of years. They honestly looked like the same stick figures a moody teen would sketch onto their notebook while bored during geometry class, which I found incredibly charming.
People have been the same for a long time, these places have been the same for much longer. They will be there if I have a bad hair day. They will be there if I miss a flight. They don’t care about The Invisible Hand. They will remain no matter who gets elected come next November.
Our final night in Utah was a little different. We spent it exploring Goblin Valley, an area officially recognized as one of the darkest on earth. Perfect for stargazing under the Milky Way! Before this evening, I had never seen a shooting star in my life. Within 90minutes, I had seen at least twenty.
We laid on picnic tables on the top of a hill and stared up. I found myself getting disoriented by all the black. It was so dark you couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the horizon began. I caught myself weaving my fingers into the lattice of the tabletop to stabilize myself as if I were going to fall off the edge of the earth if I didn’t. I could see the texture of our local galaxy all while existing inside of it.
At one point, I looked to the south and saw a white line in the sky. I initially wrote it off as my imagination, but it didn’t go away and it was growing rapidly. I asked my friend if she saw it as well to confirm I wasn’t loosing my mind and she did! And it was not only coming closer but it was changing shape right in front of our eyes. (Admittedly, part of me did consider that we may be getting abducted…)
As it shot across the skyline, it became more obvious what it was: Starlink, a train of internet satellites constantly orbiting the Earth at about 300 miles per minute. The footage embedded is not my own, but these were the closest videos I could find of what we saw. I wish I could show you my exact experience, but I’m glad I resisted my phone in that moment.
After all of the natural wonders we came across, Starlink, ironically the only man-made highlight of our trip, was one of the most beautiful moments of my entire life. Watching its shape warp across the sky confirmed before my own eyes the fisheye lens that is our atmosphere and it hit me that we really are just inside a giant snow globe.
It’s hard to not be both humbled and incredibly honored to get to have access to the stars. We are under them every night, but modern technology cuts us off from our natural right to gaze deep into the universe. I recently read a take claiming that if ancient people were to time travel and look at our drowned out sky, they would assume the gods have abandoned us. I would have to agree. I’ve seen some incredible sights in my life, but nothing will ever beat the stars.
As we were heading home, of course, I was ready to get back to city life and sleep in my own bed. But without firm travel plans for my next earthly adventure, all I could wonder, with a dash of heartbreak, was “When will I see the stars again?”
Love this Max! Your descriptions gave me chills