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You Can See Forever

© Steven Haywood Yaskell

Nights, standing in a bowl-like depression surrounded by hills I call my "eye," I look up into forever.

I come here when the rest of the neighborhood is tucked behind their TVs or are away at their night jobs, at that time when most of these folks are coming home or when those on the graveyard shift get ready for work.

Less lazy (and admittedly, luckier) ones such as I can steal away here armed with binoculars or a small telescope and step back and forward into time.

This land has been left strangely alone after the house-building frenzy of the last one hundred and fifty years. Like a lone survivor in an attack by Han Dynasty steppe dwellers, this unique arrangement of cliffs, sloping hills, and soughing reeds was intentionally spared after much willful slaughter. Though one half of it has become a golf course it is still free and surprisingly dark and wild looking on either side, thanks to environment-friendly landscaping. It is dark enough on those rare nights when what astronomers call "the seeing" is close to perfect even to see quite faint stars and fuzzy nebulae.

The perfect seeing factor is not one element, but several. All of these conspire to give the viewer of the heavens a joy that is free, yet rich. Perfect seeing must be at least a combination of a certain balance of moisture in the air, low wind turbulence a few hundred feet to hundred miles up, and little city light. In these hills the city lights of Boston - dead south at twenty miles distance where two hills meet - creates a purplish orange haze that has grown steadily stronger since the 1880s. By the 1950s it was quite impossible to see most of the Milky Way, a common sight here until then. The night sky you have to visit the mountains of southern Vermont to see today departed these eastern Massachusetts hills by the 1940s.

Another thing that helps the seeing is an absence of those large flood lamps that advertise the newest car dealership in a car-gutted part of the state. You know what I mean: the ones that signal Batman or Batwoman to the scene of the crime as they crisscross the sky. A natural killer of perfect seeing is the mosquito. If you step right into the period of their birth cycle you'll not tolerate that summer night for long. Another is the second quarter to full Moon. Only Moon fanciers love the seeing on such nights. (They even have a special name: selenologists.) In the late summer and early fall near month's end, sitting on a jutting whaleback of basalt stone, I see on nights of otherwise perfect seeing the crisp, clear image of the Moon rise above a hill that has mutely witnessed such risings for more than ten thousand years. The clearness and stillness of the atmosphere makes the Moon stand out in such a way that you can almost see the Moon's mountains cast their shadows. It almost seems an edible substance - the stereotype cheese. To me it resembles a large chalk disk on a midnight velvet blue coverlet. On wetter nights (which often aid mosquitoes in flight) the Moon seems to glister.

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