A Campfire Story

It was 35 degrees out and pitch dark.  At 23 I was attempting to build my first campfire – ever – by the light of a key chain flashlight.  My mother’s idea of camping had been a Holiday Inn Express and my brother only survived six months of Boy Scouts before dropping that for the more interesting sport of computer gaming, by which he now makes his living.  So, campfire-building wasn’t really in my skill set. 

Fumbling with the flint and knife I had been assured would create a spark, fingers numb with cold, I happened to glance heavenward.  Perhaps for guidance.  Who knows.  But as soon as I did, my hands stopped struggling.  They lay in motionless deference to what my eyes were witnessing.  I set the useless tools next to the frozen hot dogs (waiting patiently for their campfire), sat back in my chair and through a circular gap in the trees above, took in an array of stars unlike that which I had ever seen before. 

In the middle of Yellowstone National Park, at an isolated campground amidst a vast wilderness, there was and never had been any light pollution.  I realized what I had been missing all these years – how every time I wondered at the stars, I hadn’t been seeing half of what was really there. 

 

I felt suddenly small – like a child who one day finds out the world is so much bigger than his back yard.  Almost like he’s been betrayed to not have realized it before.  And I think, ‘How?  How could the sky around me be so stunningly beautiful and startlingly big and I didn’t realize it until this very moment?’

 

And that’s when I mentally surrendered my campfire building mission.  I threw the hot dogs into the cooler and locked it in the car – I don’t care what the cartoons say, bears are NOT my friends – grabbed a pack of saltine crackers which would makeup my dinner, and wandered down the short path to the river.

Sitting on the bank, I yanked off my sneakers, peeled off my socks and slipped my feat into the water.  Fed by many nearby hot springs, it warmed the ice cubes that were my toes.

I turned off my tiny flashlight, tucked my hands deep into my pockets, and lay back on the soft prairie grass.  It was a moonless night, but far brighter than any I’d seen before.  The stars twinkled off the quiet stream.  Millions upon millions of them.  It was hard to pick out individual constellations, what with every square inch boasting a star I’d never seen before.

This is what they would have seen.  Those ancient ancestors that I sometimes feel pangs of connection to.  They probably crossed this land following a buffalo heard – long ago relatives of the ones that I saw grazing here only hours earlier. 

I turn my head slightly and press my ear to the ground.  I can hear the earth’s heart beat. The echoes of horse hooves and battle cries.  The tears and wailing of a people displaced from a land that they treated as their most treasured provider.  But before that, before a new people with a new “right” way, before disease and starvation and ruin, there were the stars.  Always the stars. 

A mother and father and children, wrapped in buffalo hide, probably stared out the top of a tepee or, like me, lay in the middle of a treeless expanse, and thought “there is more out there.”  They too were probably moved to tears with a sense of overwhelming fullness at the beauty they were witnessing.  It is a somewhat uncomfortable feeling – like being presented with a thousand of the most delectable desserts and knowing you can’t possibly try them all.  It is like trying to fill yourself with something you can’t catch in your hand.  It is a sense that you are a tiny, insignificant, flawed speck on something so much grander and more pristine than you’ve been told. 

It is a humbling feeling – and one that is sorely missed today.  As I lay there, I fully came to grasp what the phrase awe-inspiring means. 

At least an hour had passed before I realized that if I didn’t get in my sleeping bag soon I would probably get frostbitten.  With a sense of sadness, I sat up, wiped my soggy feet on the grass, replaced my socks and shoes, and made my way back to our tent.

My three companions had been asleep for hours.  They had missed it all.  New moon cycles only came once a month.  Tomorrow it would be back, if only by small degrees.

Slipping into our tent, I snuggled down deep into my bag and zipped the door up – yet I couldn’t manage to fully cover the screen patch that gave me the tiniest view of the stars through the trees. 

                 That night, I dreamed of stars and laughing, barefoot children and buffalo.