Cosmic Ham

You captured a beautiful moment. I guess you're far enough north to not have smoke from the fires. Here in the Northeast, we never see a sky like that (except when miles out to sea). Thanks for sharing.

Thanks - we drove from northern Oregon where the smoke was so bad you couldn't see for more than a mile. Nevada was better and things finally got clear in Utah.

I'm a little embarrassed by my dragging of the Aloha down lots of bolder strewn roads so a replacement axle may be in the cards some day :-).

I have seen the Milky Way thousands of times over my life, and I will never get tired of it, but my very favorite memory was of someone else seeing it for the first time.

It was our last night in the Emigrant Wilderness (north of Yo-Semite) and I was sitting with two of the eight 16 year olds I’d been guiding through forests, over passes and up mountainsides for eight days. It had rained and hailed every day and the mosquitoes had been treating us like we were the drive through (fly-through?j menu. It cleared up just as we slogged into camp. We got set up for dinner and put out the tarp so we could, for once, sleep under the stars. After dinner, the kids played wilderness golf with sticks and pine cones and we had a campfire. Six of the kids went off to bed, but two boys stayed up to watch the fire with me and the two other adults that had hiked with the group. These two boys came on the trip very reluctantly. They were rough, tough, tattooed, pierced inner city kids with shaved heads. When they first showed up, the night before the trip, I admit to being a little unnerved as they were both nearly a foot taller and a hundred pounds more than I was. But I had volunteered for this, and I’d dealt with difficult kids before. The other six were from VERY privileged homes.

Anyway, we sat around the fire talking about the week. It turned out that these two were a couple of the neatest teens I’d ever been around, and the rich kids loved them too. I looked up at the sky and remarked how beautiful the stars were, as we hadn’t seen any all week. One of the boys said, “Yeah, but it’s too bad it’s still cloudy.” I responded that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the other young man said that of course there was, they were all the way across the sky. For a moment, the other two adults and I were confused, then realized that they didn’t know about the Milky Way. I mentioned this, the boys thought we were kidding. After all, Milky Way was a candy bar. It took several minutes to convince them, and when they realized that the next day they’d be going back to their inner city existence and may never see it again, one of them started to weep.

Two months later, they were back in high school and I was back to work, when I was diagnosed with cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy ensued, and somewhere in there, I got the most beautiful card from those two. They said they’d never forget being in the wilderness and their first view of our galaxy. It’s been 22 years since then, cancer has come and gone and come and gone, hips have been replaced, and eyes are beginning to fail, but I will NEVER, EVER forget those two. I just hope and pray that they grew up as strong, loviing men who care about others and all of God’s creation.

I can no longer carry a heavy pack over 12,000 foot passes or sleep on the cold, hard ground, but Hamlet lets us get away and enjoy the Milky Way, a couple fresh caught trout and a crackling campfire.  



How can we expect children to reach for the stars when they can’t see them?