No. 0: Lucky suns and ditches
We plunged zombie-armed into the fabric of night, wading through the homogeneous, untouchable, lightless velvet that cloaked the pines. We groped for a spot to pee, fingers extended, ready to touch god or be obliterated against blackjack trunks.
We felt our way back to the truck with cautious steps until we jammed our digits into steel then slid them along the quarter panel in search of a door handle.
A last look at the sky through the window revealed towering silhouettes, pine shaped cut outs in the stars. So many stars. None of them ours.
Next to Betelgeuse, the largest star in the night sky visible from the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun looks roughly 40,000 times larger. And compared to Sirius, the brightest star we can see, the Sun is more than 10 billion times brighter. But, neither of these are absolutely true. Betelgeuse is at least 700 times the size of the Sun, and Sirius is nearly twice as bright. And if our Sun eclipsed the biggest and brightest stars it would vanish, lost as a low watt speck of amber incandescence in a solar system sized sea of blue LED light. But, at the same time, that little mote of orange could swallow about a million Earths. That’s our star, and it was rising soon.
Meanwhile, 60 miles north, the Grand Canyon sprawled silently in the dark. A wonder of Earth, a shelter, a grave, an ecosystem, a ditch carved by weather and time. But, it’s our ditch and we weren’t going to miss the chance to watch the orange speck rise above it. We rolled out of the Coconino under twilight and headed north to catch the show properly from the South Rim.
After the solar ritual on the rim our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. Man made. An overlooked feat of civil engineering that quietly spares the city from snow melt and monsoon floods. A heroin den or wayward home for some. A bordello, prophet’s tablet or canvas for others. For us, the megalith beneath the street was a shrine to the carve, where we paid tribute in turns, offering sweat for joy until lunch.
Heather’s first feral full-pipe.
Head over heels in the Tunnel of Love.
