Lucky us
We plunged zombie-armed through the fabric of night, a 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 bed with cautious steps until we jammed our digits into steel and slid them along the truck's body, feeling for the door.
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.
The sun is a black pinhole.
Half that, actually.
Betelgeuse floats in the night sky. It’s Orion’s shoulder, and from where we’re standing the Sun looks 40,000 times larger. And compared to Sirius, the brightest star we can see, the Sun shines 10 billion times brighter. Both are illusions.
Betelgeuse is at least 700 times the size of the Sun, and Sirius is nearly twice as bright. And if the Sun eclipsed the biggest, brightest stars it would vanish in a solar system sized sea of blue LED light. Not even a low watt speck of amber incandescence would remain. Like the prick end of a sewing needle transiting a beach ball. And if that pin pricked the ball and let out a single red blood cell, that would be Earth. And that lost, pin prick, mote of orange would be a black hole that could swallow about a million Earths. That’s our star, and it was rising soon.
Meanwhile, 60 miles north, the Grand Canyon sprawled in the dark. An Earthly wonder, shelter, grave, ecosystem, a ditch carved by weather and time. But, it’s our ditch, over a mile deep and twice the height of any building we’ve ever built. 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 rim ritual 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.
(I originally published this on my gym’s blog on June 16th, 2023)
