… is the grand title the endless two-lane road to Cherry Springs State Park gives itself. Along the silent black willow and black cherry-lined highway, faintly legible signs urge a dark night at Frosty Hollow, Rough Cut, or Kettle Creek Lodge. You’re startled, as you adjust your brights, by every headlight. After all, it’s midnight, and almost no one lives in the state forest. But every car contains the same red light head torch yours does – everyone’s going to or coming from the starfield.

The night’s partly cloudy but the clouds are thin and there’s more clear black sky than cloud. As your eyes adjust to the dark it’s clear that it’s clear – it’s clear that the constellations and the satellites and the meteors will be attending this evening’s event, and that the meteors will even have their tails on. The cloudiness you still see is the Milky Way.

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Now you creep, with only your little red headlight, among settlements of blankets and cameras. You’re guided more by human voices than by light.

I love the murmur on this mountaintop, the gentle talk, on the long field, of sunspots and space capsules.

Sotto voce, sublunary, subculture.

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We’re all scoping the Silver-Tailed Meteor tonight, and, this being prime hunting season, we’re seeing one every few minutes. And while of course we’re here for the every-day inconceivability of the galactic show, we embrace in a special way the small darting foreground of the meteors. These we understand; these draw near and show the heavens more earthly.

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Mid-August and I’m trembling. One shivers slightly, looking up there. / The hardness and the brightness… Each meteor is a long cool drink of water, a fluency against the hardness.

We deepen the murmur with our own go-nowhere talk of physics and metaphysics; and eventually, knowing nothing, we strap back on the red light head torches, fold up our beach chairs, and drive home. Halfway there, we see the backside of a bear as it lumbers into the woods.

… to see the height of the perseids. Will blog from there.

… was even more gobsmacking than the first. Thursday night fogged up around the edges, so Cherry Springs’ vast dome, while fully dark on top, was fluted with white along the rim. The satellites and meteors and thick constellations – and of course Mars – gradually, gradually emerged, leaving the hundred or so people on the pitch-black expanse gazing with big eyes and closed lips. Blankets and alpaca coats and white wine kept us warm.

Saturday night was absolutely clear. No moon. Only stars, dripping from every edge of vision and piercing the heart at the zenith. Cloudily the Milky Way set itself as backdrop. Now there were hundreds and hundreds of people on the mountaintop, wearing their red beam headlamps and murmuring to one another about the heavens. My sister wore a coyote skin coat and kept her hands dug into its deep pockets; I wore a tight tshirt, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, a thin black winter coat, and my alpaca over the coat. Also a thick scarf and a wool hat that said Corning Museum of Glass.

As the hours passed and the stars whirled, we broke off pieces of baguette and cheese and drank more white wine. Somewhere a child announced she spied an alien and everyone laughed. Marijuana smoke floated about and I thought I’m at Woodstock for the Stars. Yes, because it was a celebration, in a muted raptured way; we were gathered, dark-adapted, for galactic observance, with all the spirit and fear in the moment.