The Last Word On Nothing

I believe. 

I don’t know in what exactly, but something is happening out there, gears and orbits turning, disparate points meeting, then moving apart. We’re bound in ways unexplained by simple principles of causality. That is my belief.

My youngest turned 18 last week as comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passed at its closest to Earth, which didn’t mean much to me. The night was cloudy and I shrugged off the viewing because cake and candles were on hand. 

At dawn the next day, the two of us set off on a road trip from Colorado to California, camping in wide open desert as we crossed Utah and Nevada. Near the border of the two states, we drove onto the dusty hardpack of a dried up Pleistocene lakebed where we disgorged camping chairs, an ice chest, and sleep gear. This could have been another planet, and without a living thing to be seen we pondered whether it was the moon or Mercury. A near-full moon was up by sunset, a ‘supermoon’ on its closest approach to Earth, though I lose track of superlatives as events seem to grow bigger and more auspicious all the time. As dark set in, it was far from dark. Moon milk filled this ancient basin. We pressed our bare feet into soft, pale sediment, wandering this way an that, pulled by the gravity of the flat middle of nowhere. 

I’d forgotten about the comet or which part of the sky I was supposed to be paying attention to when I spotted its long misty tail above where the sun had set. I shouted to my kid, who was strolling a few hundred feet away. The view clarified by the second and by the time we came together, this cosmic event was clear to our eyes. We were fly-by’s witnessing each other. Considering that it likely came from Oort Cloud at the outer limits of our solar system and would not be back for 80,000 years, if it ever comes back at all, the passing of this comet felt like a rare moment of eye contact, strangers from far away crossing for an instant. It felt meaningful.

At the birthday party, I had a rare meeting with my older kid, who is 21. We had only recently met up after a year and a half apart, a distance I’d been counting in days. What a relief it was to my heart seeing her, cooking dinner for her, laughing with her.

Here’s the thing I hadn’t calculated: July of 2020 I was on a road trip with my two kids to California when we camped not far from this same Ice Age playa. It was the last time I was in this area, traveling along Highway 50, known as the “Loneliest Road in America.” We got out in the middle of this empty desert highway and took pictures of ourselves. Our first night of the trip we camped along a backroad and spotted the forked tail of Neowise, another long-period comet from the Oort Cloud. I hold that night in 2020 as a precious memory, the three of us handing a pair of binocular back and forth as we marveled at the first comet they’d ever seen. 

Comets are the common denominator between that trip and now, in nearly the same place. The three of us had used the acute V of Neowise to orient our journey. In California we spotted it in the company of giant sequoia trees as we backpacked from the mountains to the sea. A couple weeks after that, the forest we hiked through burned down behind us in a terrible fire. Historic buildings we visited perished. Then came arguments, shouting, and then years of my daughter moving out of my orbit until we were estranged. It felt like she’d broken free and I wondered if I would ever see her again. Weeks ago, the silence finally ended when she reached out and we met. When we parted, we hugged. A great weight lifted off my heart. 

Last week on the playa with my younger, with feet pressed into the soft sediment of ice ages, we marveled at this trail of ice and dust behind Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, stretched out by prevailing solar winds. I had a sense of geometry, angles meeting, circles within triangles within squares. Without thinking about it, I’d brought us back to more or less the same place, and when we looked up, this is what we saw. The next night, we moved on to Death Valley where we banged along a rough road into moon-filled dusk. At the end of the road, we parked, loaded gear on our backs, and walked a few miles into lonely, mountainous dunes. Through barren washes and rock gardens without a trail, we set a course halfway between Polaris and the comet. When we climbed into the dunes, we wandered in the visual disorientation of moonlight on sinuous sand waves. The comet fell behind mountains to the west. 

The next night, we reached the Pacific Ocean. A misty atmosphere obscured the sky. We knew where the comet should be, its placement like a compass point. I felt as if we were playing out a story, very similar to the last passing comet, but not exactly the same.

I surmise that causality bears some sort of DNA, a spiraling structure where events wind around each other, meeting and unmeeting, evolving as they touch and separate. I don’t believe that anything is chained to an unalterable future. I do believe in rhythms and connections, and outcomes that keep nudging each other this way and that. If you could step back and map it out, all this motion would make sense. When a stranger passes from two light years away, you look up, take account. What’s happening here is far more than chance.

Photo of my 18-year-old and Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from the west Utah desert