The Last Word On Nothing

One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and then we bedeck our bikes with lights: front lights, back lights, hub lights, even flashing holiday lights sometimes. High-vis is key; as my wife says, “Trust no car.”

We were headed to a Star Party. I had never heard of a Star Party until my wife told me about it. “It’s basically a bunch of people set up big telescopes in a field and you go look at stars,” she said. She’s good at finding out about these sorts of things—gatherings you had to be In The Know about, but quirky ones.  

To try anything that depends on clear nights in the dead of the western Washington winter is to tempt fate, but the weather gods were feeling charitable. When we pedaled into the park, we could see the shadow of a man and a large telescope on the dark side of the public restrooms. He was drinking something steaming from a travel mug, and appeared to be alone.

It was a party, all right.

We ambled over. The telescope was pointed at some requisite bright dot just above the horizon that I could see through Seattle’s vague orange glow. I guessed the dot was a planet, but I wasn’t sure. Stars and their ilk are like plants for me, in that I find them benignly fascinating and even know a few of the more obvious ones. I don’t mean to sound dismissive. Every year, I pledge that this will be the year that I finally buckle down and learn more. But so far I have yet to.

“Wanna take a look?” the man asked us. “It’s on Jupiter.”

I sensed my daughter stiffen next to me. She is in the midst of a Greek Myths phase, and sometimes takes it as a personal affront whenever anyone refers to a member of the Greek Pantheon by their Roman name. But she didn’t hold this fellow’s indiscretions against him, duly clambering up on the milk crate he had set out as a step stool so she could look through the eyepiece.

“See Jupiter?” the man asked.

“Uh-huh,” my daughter said.

“And those dots around it?” the man said. “Those are the Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.”

“Io!” My daughter perked up, the skies coming alive for her. “She was the cow!” She started rattling off bits of story about Io and Zeus and Hera and Hermes, and then Europa, and Ganymede and Zeus, and other figures whose names I could sort of recall, both from her researches, and also my own Greek Myths phase from decades ago.

A small group approached with a couple of kids. They stood behind us to wait their turn. “That one’s moving!” one of the kids shouted. “Is it a shooting star?”

“That’s a plane,” the man said. He turned to the adults. “Jet City,” he said in a What can you do? kind of way. “And I work at Boeing,” he added, perhaps as an apology.  

We left him and went to another part of the field, where two other telescopes were set up. Here there actually was a party. Maybe fifteen or twenty people were standing in the dark and enjoying light astronomical cocktail chatter while their kids scampered about. One fellow was gesturing into the sky with the most amazing laser pointer I had ever seen, using it to show the Pleiades, Sirius, Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus, other distant wonders. But most of the crowd had gathered around a big man who was holding forth in front of a commensurately big telescope.

“Are there any mothers here?” the man was saying when we sidled to the front. He was like a carnival barker. “Where are the mothers?”

For a couple of moments no one around us said a word. The man scanned the assembled before zeroing in on my wife and daughter and me, since we were, I realized, standing closest to him. He looked somewhat theatrically from my wife to the child at her side who was presumably hers, thus making her A Mother.

There seemed to be no point in denying it. My wife tentatively raised her hand.

“Excellent!” the man said. “C’mon over here.” My wife walked to his scope. “Know what you’re looking at?” he asked as she peered into the eyepiece.

My wife shook her head.  

“I’ve got it just a little below Orion’s belt, on the sword,” the man said. “That’s the Orion Nebula. What you’re looking at is a star nursery. It’s where stars are born! Those are all baby stars!”

“Wow,” my wife said. “There are so many.”

After my daughter had a look and was suitably impressed, I took my turn. There was the immediate paradox of the eyepiece’s diameter against the breadth of the view it afforded: one inch, millions of miles. They were amazing, all the tiny points of light. I tried to do some rough conversions of scale as I stared: of how big those white dots actually are, how far the Earth is from them, how old they are becoming, how they’re expanding and gloriously hot and their light that I’m seeing now is already gone, and all the other perceptual gymnastics astronomy necessitates that in the end start to make my head hurt, but in a good way. I stepped away to give someone else a turn. I’ve known of Orion for how long? And all I ever saw were the biggest, brightest stars and Betelgeuse. How had I missed the rest of it all these years? There was so much scattered about, waiting to be noticed, blazing in silence, if only I could be bothered to look.

I found my wife and daughter and said something to this effect, full of feeling, with a certain amount of handwaving. “Mm-hm,” my wife said. “And yet, somehow, you still find a way to make it all about you.”

A fair point. But I am human. We are good at making it about us.

We thanked the man with the big telescope. By then it was getting late, so we went back to our bikes. We switched on all the lights and pedaled out of the parking lot, checked for cars, turned onto the street, headed for home. My wife and daughter took the lead on our tandem bike, while I rode behind. I watched my daughter gesturing, could hear her enthusing about something to my wife, the two of them talking, and all the while the hub lights pulsed and twinkled like little stars, saying, Here we are, here we are, here we are.  

Image of the Orion Nebula courtesy of NASA