Organ Pipe Cactus NM, 1990

Posted on June 24, 2003 in Biomes Book of Days Travels - Past

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: This is what you can see by starlight.

Here in Trabuco Canyon, the valley of the lost blunderbuss, we have many nights when diaphonous stratus clouds cover the light of most of the stars. I’ve seldom seen all the stars and, when I can, I’ve been hard put to make out their configurations even with a star chart.

I remember a night at Organ Pipe Cactus NM when I walked out to the edge of the campground, starchart in hand, partly to see what I could make out of the distant suns overhead, partly to leave Lynn resting in peace. She slept because we’d spent the day circling the western park loop road. I set out along a trail that led to an abandoned claim. Fist-sized rocks scattered in dark reflection of the fields above. I made out the dippers, Cassopeia, and then gave up. No comets or meteors enlivened the display. It was as captivating as the lights of a city skewering one another. I wanted full light so that I could see colors and desert life moving about.

We were bound for Phoenix the next day, so my time here was ended. (I love and hate vacations because I never seem to have the space to explore things more completely.) I released my eyes to wander over the long flat between the campground and the Ajo Mountains, which had kidnapped my vision all too profoundly; I mourned that I would not be seeing them again. Following the declivity, my sight rolled south until I came to the bright cluster that was Lukeville, maybe ten, maybe twenty miles distant. My disappointment flowed like a wash — past the Mexican city ten miles beneath the border, past the volcanos, and into the Gulf of California which almost reached the Arizona border.

I walked back, spent a little time reading at the picnic table, plugged my ears against the abominable roar coming from the generator pumping electricity to feed the hunger of the squeamist occupants of a RV, and crawled into the pup tent where I spent a hard night pitching and yawing like a satellite on a mess of pebbles that we couldn’t quite clear out.

I took many pictures there, but developed none of them. It’s a memory without record except what is in my mind.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: It was Sunday, the time it happened.