Star Witness

Star Witness

6-22-13

Noel Laflin

It was a last minute trip as I recall.  But then again, it was some forty four years ago.  We had driven up Highway 395 late one Friday night and swung into Death Valley from the Western entrance.  Dog tired from the long trip, we chose the first opportunity to pull off the road and roll out the sleeping bags.  It was well past one in the morning.

As the night was mild, we lay atop our bedrolls and sank into the blissful comfort of a large sand dune we had staked out as our own private mountain retreat.

There was neither moon nor artificial city light by which to dim the starry illumination all about us. As Death Valley stretches across such a low elevation, the sky above was truly dark.  Consequently, I have never seen so many celestial twinkling lights spread out across our universe.  The Milky Way never seemed so vast and yet so intimate.  We talked quietly among ourselves commenting on our good fortune of being the only ones out here to catch such a night - such a sight.  And, as the four of us gazed upward with arms behind our heads, lined up as we were atop our soft sandy mattress, the shooting star spectacular commenced. 

“Whoa…did you see that one!” a Scout cried out, bolting upright with excitement.

“There’s another one,” said lad number two.  “It just streaked the entire sky!”

“And there’s another,” whispered a third voice. 

“Two at the same time!” the last kid exclaimed.

So it began and so it continued for the next two hours as hundreds of bits of rock and dust entered our atmosphere at a gazillion miles an hour, burning their way across our vast field of view, zipping their way into eventual pulverization.   It occurred to the sixteen-year-old boy who drifted off to sleep atop that sand dune that the spectacle was in the witnessing.  He had never seen a darker sky nor counted a night so filled with speeding light.

The sixty-year-old man of today still marvels at the memory.

He thanks his young witness.