The Cabin...Again

    Our friends were kind enough to invite us back down to their cabin, a place not much larger than the single 12x16-foot room home of Maude Lewis, the artist recently mentioned and highlighted in the movie Maudie.  But this cabin* was built with heart and from the ground up.  Through the years, we watched as our friend brought siding and insulation and ever-so-tiny bits and pieces down to the cabin, each 2-hour journey of goods only adding to the cozy affection in this off the grid location.  Of course we joined this time lapse of construction midway, missing the initial frame building and his climbing solo up to the rafters to attach beams, or dragging a toboggan through the snows that would pile 6 feet high and block his entry in winter.  But when we first arrived some five years ago, you could sit out by the crude fire pit and hear the distant coyotes, an eerie call even to our dogs who were quite tougher back then in their younger years.  Now the coyote and occasional wolf tracks were more difficult to discover, replaced by the pumping stations of oil companies, their shale footprint now dotting the landscape like an acne gone wild on this desert landscape.  If there was to be any consolation, the automated stations were dimly lit as if their steel casings had little worry of being punctured or broken, all of which allowed us to see what we had come here for...darkness.

   I had written about darkness some time ago, and how difficult if often seems to find it.  Our homes are lit with night lights, as are our streets, cities and computer screens.  So when that occasional view of a dark sky ablaze only with thousands of stars comes our way --maybe on a camping trip or that rare night flight when the cabin lights are actually quite dim and we peek out the window-- we marvel at the sight as if we were again children; the illuminated sky suddenly as thrilling as spotting a deer in the woods or a bear near the road, sights unique enough that we treasure them as if soon they too will be gone.  And this particular night we would watch another marvel...the International Space Station.  Exactly as charted, the ISS passed overhead at 7:45, its reflection as steady and as bright as the largest star.  "Wave," my friend's wife said, as if we were stranded alone on this planet and our rescue ship was now there, and there, and now there, leaving as gracefully as it had come.  It was amazing to think that there were people up there, that our engineering had somehow gotten this craft up there and left it at that precise altitude --not a mile higher or lower-- but exactly at the position of geosynchronous orbit.  Amazing, I said, not only at the ISS but at our gaze now turned to the stars.  Life was here and up there, and most amazing, we were here to feel and see it.  "Why me," my friend turned to me and asked?  "I mean, I've done my share of bad so why do I get to be here?  We've got good lives, good women, good health...why us and not somebody else?"  Good question, both of us reinforcing our own daily thanks of being alive and able to enjoy life.  His wife's sister has multiple myeloma and she cares for her husband who has a rare form of palsy (like ALS, his palsy has progressed to the point where he struggles just to raise his eyelids, his larger muscle groups already gone).  So indeed...why us?

    We plopped ourselves down into a few slingback chairs nears the fire.  It was chilly but we had bundled up.  The sky was solid dark except for the pinprick of stars that seemed so many that we felt beyond small.  Then the flashes came.  First one, bright like a stray flashlight hitting your eyes, then a dot that moved away at about four times the speed of the ISS.  What was that?, we all exclaimed.  Something's happening, my friend said.  Then another flash some distance away, same intensity, and same movement.   Whoa, we gasped...what was that?  We began talking of life beyond us, of alien abductions as depicted by the series The 4400, of military exercises.  Then another flash, same brightness, only this one in a different area; put them together and they would have formed a vast triangle.  And now they were all gone, moving and disappearing as quickly as shooting stars.  Wow, we all said, did you see that we gasped...deer in the forest, lights in the sky.  Cosmic (but this was not the cosmic crash so highlighted back in August where, said the Chicago Tribune: "This is getting everything you wish for," said Syracuse University physics professor Duncan Brown, one of more than 4,000 scientists involved in the blitz of science that the crash kicked off.  "This is our fantasy observation." ...Two neutron stars, collapsed cores of stars so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh 1 billion tons, danced ever faster and closer together until they collided, said Carnegie Institution astronomer Maria Drout..."This is like a cosmic atom smasher at a scale far beyond humans would be capable of building," said Andy Howell, a staff scientist at the Las Cumbres Observatory.  "We finally now know what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object and it's a kilonova."  Funny thing though, this all happened so far away that even the light traveling from the event took 130 million years to reach us).  My brother asked me the next day if all of this had taken place in the Pleiades, the constellation closest to our human range of vision and the subject of ancient texts throughout the world (the pyramids of Giza seem to point directly to the stars in the Orion belt, says the blog of the Pachamama Alliance).   We speculated that it was military or aliens or something beyond our intelligence...then shrugged.

The moon and Regulus from the cabin

   We had dinner, chatted about a few more things, slept soundly and woke to the chill of morning darkness, the moon's crescent valiantly struggling to show off its own beauty now that the earth had rotated the stars away to a distant corner.  Coffee was bubbling in the percolator and the orange of day was eeking its way over the hillside.  Glancing up to again see what was left of this darkness was another bright star, one of the brightest and something National Geographic described as "moon eclipses Leo's heart"...the star Regulus (from now until pretty much the end of the month you can look up into the night sky and witness not one but two rare events, the zodiacal lights and the Orionid meteors spewing off of Haley's Comet).  We had witnessed something unusual, at least for us.  Perhaps this was a common event in these darkened skies, skies which we so rarely see in the bright city night.  But the unusual event for us wasn't the space shuttle or the flashes of light, bonuses to be sure; our special event was just being humbled and reminded of where we were in all of this, of the massive show that was out there 24/7 and one which we so rarely witness.

    As it turns out, finding us at all is only a recent discovery.  Discover put it this way: It’s a surprisingly big deal.  This normal matter, the types of particles that make up you and me and everything astronomers can see in the universe, seemed to be evading detection.  The mystery of this missing stuff officially began in the early 1990s when scientists first tallied up all the stars, hot gas, cold dust and everything else they knew about.  The total amounted to only a fraction of all the normal matter that the universe should have created during its first few minutes, based on other, super-solid observations using both the oldest cosmic light and nuclear physics equations. (Dark matter is its own mystery, and it involves totally different stuff.)...Over the next two decades, as telescopes became more sensitive, astronomers would make some progress hunting that unseen normal matter they knew had to be there.  But the numbers still weren’t adding up. “There’s a huge disconnect,” says Argonne National Laboratory cosmologist Lindsey Bleem.  “We’re missing about 30 percent of the [normal matter] we know should be there when we do this accounting.”  And the fact that astronomers couldn’t find it was disconcerting.  After all, telescopes can see every form of light, from radio waves all the way up to high-energy gamma rays.  Regular matter shouldn’t be able to hide. (the article goes on to highlight the missing wavelength...microwaves)

    So there we were, in that microwave spectrum, a form of background radiation that goes back almost to the Big Bang.  But at that point all that science stuff didn't matter.  We were with friends and glad to just be alive and to be here at this moment; why us, we had to keep asking, especially when so many others had been caught in floods or shootings or droughts or whatever.  We were so fortunate to have the time and place to just glance up for a night and to wonder about it all, our place here and our lives past, present and future.  And as we futilely waved our flashlights at the shuttle in the hopes that we'd be seen, this night only left us thinking that the light might not be seen by those in the shuttle but by those far past it.  And in some distant galaxy or universe 130 million years hence, when all of us would be long gone, four other beings might be sitting somewhere staring up at the night sky with similar thoughts, catching a glimpse of lights waving and gasp to themselves...did you see that?

Morning peeks through as the Earth rotates

 



*An earlier post two years ago described one of our first adventures to this cabin, as well another post that told of one of the many experiences one has while at such a remote location.