The first 18 years of my life were spent in dark flatlands where the nighttime skies were flabbergasting. In southeast Texas rice fields stretched across the plains, interrupted only by small towns and oil refineries. Mall sprawl conquered much of the land after I left, but in the 1960s the skies darkened thoroughly and revealed a panorama of stars after each sunset. Later my family moved to rural Indiana, so far removed from urban America that Evansville, 30 miles distant, was the only place large enough to make even a mild glow on the horizon. Seeing thousands of stars a night was routine. The Milky Way, that magnificent cross-sectional view of our galaxy, was an ordinary part of nighttime. Except for the severe humidity, which tends to warp images through a telescope, these places were an amateur astronomer’s dream.
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We had a telescope. I can’t remember any of its features, except that the tube was blue and I could never see anything through it. Recently my dad confessed that he couldn’t either, and it turns out we’re not alone: cheap telescopes probably turn more people away from astronomy than anything else. They’re tedious to focus, and as soon as you get them on the mark the slightest breeze knocks them off. So we mostly depended on our bare eyes to navigate the universe.
I didn’t know that when I escaped Posey County I would be forever giving up darkness. It was a sacrifice that never entered my mind. I was so inexperienced in the ways of the urban world that when I moved to Evanston to go to college I packed a flashlight, and the first few evenings of freshman orientation I stuck it in my pocket. I didn’t know it would never get dark enough to need it.
I see stars in the night sky perhaps 14 nights out of the year, on clear nights when I’m visiting my family or on vacation in an isolated place. But it’s not the same as seeing them on a regular basis. The damn galaxies just aren’t there when I need them. They aren’t around when I’m feeling sorry for myself and need a reminder that my life is an insignificant speck in the universe. They’re not there when I get my new issue of Sky & Telescope magazine and learn of some amazing celestial event in the universe that I’m going to miss. The stars are a feature in my life only in the way that mountains and oceans are: I have to travel to see them.
The blackout–we’d have to call it Star Mania or something with a positive PR spin–would be announced and publicized well ahead of time. I can picture it so clearly: On the appointed night people would climb out on fire escapes, open hatch doors to the roofs of apartment buildings, walk out into backyards. Teenagers would drive to open areas and linger on the hoods of cars, families would go to the lakefront parks as though it were the Fourth of July. Everyone would stake out a space with a clear view and await the moment. Then at 10:30 PM, when it was completely dark but not so late that children couldn’t stay up, poof! Commonwealth Edison would pull the plug, and the glowing bubble that surrounds the city would dissolve.
