Closer To The Sky

I’m a city dweller by nature. Although I crave solitude, I prefer the hum of urban noise around me. I don’t (usually) mind the thumping of my upstairs neighbor, or the voices of people gathering in the courtyard just below my front door. My small, square parcel is on the corner of the building and faces away from everything else, except the townhouses next door. I’m alone in a crowd, and that suits me just fine.

My condo is surrounded by trees and buildings, but I have a nice view of the northern and western skies. I have a comfortable vantage point for watching sunsets, and the moonsets, depending on where we are in the cycle and how far north, or south, the moon is traveling. If the sky is very clear, I can see some of the brighter planets and a few stars, including the three that sit in Orion’s Belt. Urban living is never really very dark, only shadowy.

If I could change anything about where I live, I’d like to have more sky, more darkness, and a solitary place outside to immerse myself in it. Back yards come with too much responsibility, but a private courtyard would be nice. A dark courtyard, in the city. I know myself well enough, and I’d end up stringing twinkly white lights everywhere and it still wouldn’t be dark enough to see any more stars than I can now. I also go to bed with the chickens and miss most of the actual nighttime anyway.  That’s not likely to change.

My family lived on a farm in Central Texas, when I was born. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the porch with my father on summer evenings. He would point out both Dippers, Sirius, the North Star and then the Pleiades, saving the story of the seven sisters for last. I never thought to ask him where he learned about the night sky. Like most kids, I just thought he knew everything. My dad grew up in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and New York City, so it’s not likely he learned about the stars as a child. He sailed to China with the Marines in the 1930s. I’m sure he saw lots of stars, and I like to think that’s where he learned their stories. I still have his USMC embroidered photo album from that time. It’s slowly disintegrating, but it can still whisper remnants of the ghost stories it knows.

Evening porch sitting ended when I was in the first grade and we moved to Killeen, the city adjacent to Fort Hood. I never thought about it again, until now. We had a nice backyard, with a patio but there probably wasn’t as much to see inside that little square patch of lawn, as there was from the vastness of the country porch.

My father died in 1974 and unlike some of our dead who remain nearby, his spirit didn’t hang around. Ever the adventurer, he had places to go and things to do and he skedaddled out among the stars he loved. In this life, he was always moving forward. He never talked about his past and at the time, I wasn’t old enough to realize there were things I’d want to know. I was able to unravel some of the strands of his family story from my aunts before they died, and from cousins I’ve connected with through genealogy research. Learning more about the early chapters of his life helped satisfy some of my curiosity but had little to do with the man I knew. Sitting in the dark, on the front porch, star-stepping with him through the universe, while safe in my little chair, that’s who was my father was to me.

For a time in the mid-late 1980s, I had unlimited access to the sky. I lived in a country subdivision, where each lot was over an acre and only a small fraction of the lots had homes on them. I had 360-degree views of wide open, endless skies. We didn’t have a porch, per se, but we did have a large open deck, in addition to another one poolside. The house was slightly elevated, built into a small hill, and I could watch weather systems as they approached from at least fifty miles away. I saw the shade of green the sky turns just before a tornado formed, and for the first time I fully understood the terror in knowing what that meant. I watched the endless sky cycle through the twilight of dusk and dawn, each day unique in color and composition. I took the openness of the Central Texas sky for granted then.

It’s easy to romanticize now and it was marvelous, but open sky living comes with more than its share of creepy crawlies and slithery things and I’m not much of a fan of them up close. In addition to falling stars and fireflies were armies of tarantulas that marched down the warm asphalt streets after dark in the summer. More than once, I opted to sit by the pool when I got home from work because a large, black, hairy spider was camped out too close to the door handle for me to open the lock. And how that scorpion managed to climb three stories up a drainpipe to get stuck in the bathroom sink, time and time again, I’ll never know.

The most unusual sky-experience I ever had happened in a suburban neighborhood, north of Houston, with houses all around and very close by. I woke up one night, unable to open my eyes, but through my eyelids, could see an extremely bright light shining in through my bedroom window and I could hear an engine of some sort, but like nothing I’d ever heard before, hovering above the house. I couldn’t move but I didn’t feel restrained. I was aware of a presence observing me in my bedroom, but I wasn’t afraid. I have no idea how long the episode lasted. It could have been minutes, or it could have been hours. When it was finally over the bright light shot straight up into the sky and disappeared. I got up out of bed, checked and found no physical signs of restraint or that anything else was wrong with me, and went to the window. The houses around mine were dark and quiet and I wondered how it was that the bright light and engine humming just feet above the rooftops didn’t wake them. I can’t prove it, but I know someone, or something, was observing me in my bed that night. They obviously left me there, but I’ve never been sure if that meant I passed, or that I failed. Or that I’d want to know.

In 2000, I moved from the suburbs, to inside the Houston city limits. I live in an exceptionally populated area, mostly apartments, condos, townhomes and office buildings, which means lots of people and noise. For a while, camping trips were a preferred way of connecting with the sky. I camped for the first time in my life at age 40, so the novelty of pitching tents and blowing up air mattresses wore off before the end of that decade. I enjoy the night sounds, and the light shows overhead, and at ground level (fireflies), but the effort outweighs the reward in my book, and I really prefer hotels.

One of my favorite ways to be close to the sky is at sea. Seeing as how I’m neither a sailor, nor wealthy enough to be boat-poor, the best option for me to set sail is on a cruise ship. Yes, I know that they’re a nightmare of humanity in an enclosed space, desperately trying to have a good time with copious amounts of alcohol, but I can spend forever sitting on a private balcony (this is an absolute must), watching the endless waves. As I mentioned earlier, I’m good at being alone in a crowd. Sitting between the sea and the sky, from pre-dawn coffee, through sunrise, midday and sunset, until the stars reappear, and I can no longer keep my eyes open, is hands-down my favorite thing ever. I’m pretty sure I can’t afford to live on a cruise ship, but I still read every article that says it’s possible, just in case a sea-faring hotel lifestyle might be within reach.

I guess I need to remember what I’ve always known. That the sky doesn’t begin where I end, and there is no boundary or line of demarcation between us. I am one with the sky, with my feet on the ground. I’m content to be sitting at my window, getting lost in the clouds and the stars and the moon, until I figure out how to live at sea, without having to operate the boat.

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