Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 29, 1990 TAG: 9007250463
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On 603 I come home to a bright spot high in the Pedlar Hills. It is solitary, for now, but lights seem to breed with a reckless intensity.
Most evenings, there should be light - the gift of the stars and moon - but humans have destroyed that primeval balance. In its gentler moments, the night was once a time of slowly changing star patterns and the moon's monthly largess.
Fortunately, the night sometimes returns to even the great pollution-choked cities. There are evenings in Manhattan when, after a great storm or fierce winds have cleared away the suffocating brown haze, the inhabitants can see the Pleiades, Taurus, Cassiopeia, Orion.
Living there for more than 30 years taught me to treasure those rare, rare moments. During them there is still too much artificial illumination, but the stars are relatively sharp and undiminished.
Even New Yorkers have a right to the stars.
Here in Ironto, the stars and the moon are in good shape, but often at night I wander up Hightop Mountain to check. I don't go on the darkest nights, preferring to saunter out when a glorious moon tells me the woods are full of her soft gift, or when the moon is gone and the stars have dominion. Then I lace on my hiking boots and listen to the call.
In late June with the moon in the ascendant, I walk up the dirt road above my house, cut across a small field where in winter I often find a herd of deer bedded down, then up into a large sloping pasture surrounded by cherries, walnuts and oaks. I work my way to the top, push through some red maples, and begin following another dirt road which edges to the north of Hightop.
The farmer next door, Phillip Compton, tells me there is a bear here that tears at the cherry trees later in the summer. One night I hope to meet that creature. I have little fear of bears, for I have met many in my wanderings, and none has bothered me. They either run off with amazing speed or continue to feed unconcernedly, and I never press too close. Seeing the Hightop bear will reward months of rising anticipation, like Isaac McCaslin finally sighting Old Ben in Faulkner's "The Bear."
Tonight, however, the cherries are not ripe and there is no bear. A screech owl calls and covers the night with its soft tremolo.
Like Thoreau, I "rejoice that there are owls," but I don't totally agree that owls "represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have." For me, there is little as grand as the deep "Hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo" of the great horned owl.
I keep walking, noticing the splendid light on the sassafras and clammy locust. The burst of spring wildflowers has gone, and now oxeye daisy and black-eyed susan have taken over, although rough-fruited cinquefoil, deptford pink and bladder campion regularly can be found. Soon goldenrods and asters will rule, the last surge of flowers before winter.
I leave the road for an isolated patch of white pine. The moon through the long, thin needles is an enviable experience. It seems to wash away all sense of humanness. I sit for a while letting it clear away the clutter of my life, and soon I am refreshed and delighted by this distillate of sun.
I work my way back into the pasture, noticing how the mountains seem subdued in the calm light and soft wrappings of summer foliage. David Rains Wallace, in hiking through the mysterious Klamath Mountains, noticed, "a tension in the ridges that departed radically from conventional notions of the irregularity and relaxations of wide open spaces. It was almost an attention. . . . Nightfall deepened the impression of attentiveness."
While the time-worn Appalachians don't exhibit that tension, the moon on Hightop and its neighbors, Paris and Poor, Brush and Fort Price, does create its own attentiveness. The trees and bushes lose their clarity of definition, and imagination takes over. Freed from the restraints of color, the vegetation seems to come from one unified, moon-soaked source.
As I continue downhill, the light suffuses everything I pass. A scientist might be able to dissect this glow into its spectral components, but what would be missed. This light is magically, almost palpable, mythological. When I reach my house, it too has been transformed. During the day, a simple A-frame, now a part of a lunar atmosphere.
My other favorite time to explore Hightop is when the moon is gone and the stars are their brightest. It is then that the constellations become jeweled designs set in an immense background of endless galaxies. Late fall and winter are usually the prime seasons. The heat is gone and the humidity has lessened; the stars take on a preternatural brilliance.
Last January, one such evening occurred and I took advantage. Up into my familiar pasture I moved, and soon a great star field spread out above me. The deer that I disturbed bounded away in long arching leaps above the frozen pasture.
Jupiter was still in Taurus, slowly working toward Gemini. I wandered from Andromeda to Perseus to Auriga.
Capella, Auriga's brightest star and one relatively close to us, is 45 light years from Earth. At our present speed of space travel, it would take over 10 billion years to reach it. Even the closest star to us, the dim Alphas Centauri, would take over a billion years to reach. Humbling distances, but astonishingly I am able to look up and savor light that has come trillions and trillions of miles.
On an evening like this, Walt Whitman wrote in "A Clear Midnight":
This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless/
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,/
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,/
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
That January night I joined the "free flight into the wordless," but the stars were my main concern. Death seemed far, far away, inconsequent in the celestial amplitude.
My reverie broke and I moved down toward my house. I passed under some Virginia Pines and crossed 603.
Another night walk was ending.
Soon I would elect to consume some more of the earth's oil blood by clicking on a wall switch, that fossil-fueled light a marvelous gift and an increasing threat, a steady comfort and an enormous plague.
by CNB