By Ammi Midstokke
I don’t know when I stopped paying attention to the night sky. Maybe smoke season and crisp autumn blues have me swinging between anxiety and bliss during daylight, and forgetting the night altogether. Maybe it’s because I’m in bed with my lenses out by nightfall in the summer. Maybe it is because the night sky is fading into the ominous sherbert glow of progress, urban sprawl, and those billboards advertising adult stores and flu shots. Or I’ve lost my ability to see at night. Certainly, we as a species have lost our connection to darkness and the stars, one streetlamp at a time.
What I didn’t realize is… how much we’re missing.
I have a memory of climbing in the Tatoosh Range on the south side of Rainier some years ago. My journey began with an evening schlepp to a lake’s edge where I pitched my tent in the dark. The night was so still, the water did not even make a sound. All around me, only a thick black ribbon of jagged mountains could be seen separating the cosmos above from its reflection on the lake. It felt like I could drink the stars.
A friend told me once about sailing on the open sea in the Mediterranean on a starry night, the boat moving in no direction, just settled as the only object between sea and sky. Stars above, stars below, he spent the night in a magical disorientation, floating within the Milky Way and sensing for the only time in his life his presence within it.
Just north of Ketchum, Idaho, deep in the Sawtooth Mountains, is the nation’s first Dark Sky Preserve. It is the result of a collection of communities, organizations, and landowners. It is also the result of a need to reduce light pollution and preserve the night sky. That is to say, we cannot see a thing we are surrounded by, having lost touch with this ethereal and primal part of our natural existence, and must now go to a place far, far away to really see the night.
I’ve been reading Paul Bogard’s book, “The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.” I had the honor of meeting Paul in the Sawtooth Mountains, of standing under those very stars and staring through a telescope at spiral galaxies and distant nebula. Of all the ways to be humbled by our insignificance, this is by far the most wonderful.
It’s not often that we pick up a book that gives us both a sense of awe and hope. We’re reading books about how roads are ruining animal migration, sound is changing birdsong, logging is ruining the livelihood and lives of indigenous peoples, the Paleo Diet is increasing greenhouse gasses. With the exception of Jane Goodall, we’re feeling disparate and hopeless about problems we don’t have solutions to. Or solutions that feel too complex to implement. Mostly I feel guilty about being born a parasite and owning a series of iPhones.
In Bogard’s book he says there was a time when the Milky Way left us casting our shadows on the ground, and that time was not so long ago. The night, and darkness, is when so many things are their most animated, most alive. It is an essential, critical, part of the health of our little globe. And restoring this natural sky-scape is also achievable, a thing that does not have to go extinct, a memory that we can still make and offer generations to come.
I am grateful for the reminder to reconnect to nature and my own biological integrity in ways I’ve neglected—like moving around in the dark, pausing between my car and the front door at night to look up, and finding pockets of wilderness that are less ravaged by humanity.
These are the things that can fill us with hope again, empower us to be part of a positive change. Sometimes all it takes is turning off our lights.
Ammi Midstokke has always been afraid of the dark, but only because she spends too much of it inside.
