by Marybeth Holleman

We’ve traveled from our home in Alaska to Big Bend National Park, where one thing I most want to see is the Milky Way. Where we live is so far north it’s never warm and dark together. Where we live is too far north to see the curve of stars, the galaxy of which we’re part. 

After dinner at the lodge we step outside and see Greg and Heady, a couple from San Antonio staying in the room next to ours. These last few days, they’ve been driving the dirt roads in their pickup while we hike among cactus and along the Rio Grande. We’ve maintained a polite awareness, guessing from the little we see that we don’t have much in common. These last few years, I’m more wary of strangers: I don’t want to know if the people sleeping in the next room voted for him; I wouldn’t be able to sleep, to stop arguing with them in my head.

Still, I’m so excited about something we experienced that day that I have to tell someone.  So, as my husband walks ahead into the dark, I hang back to tell Greg and Heady about the rattlesnake we saw on the park road: how it was lying flat out like a stick, how it curled quick into the question of attack at our approach, how excited we were, and also afraid for it, how we tried to coax it from the road with sticks and stones so it wouldn’t get hit by a car, how instead it just coiled more tightly, so we turned back to the ranger station, thinking we’d ask their help in rescuing the rattlesnake, but then how we turned around again to check on it, and it was gone, only our sticks and stones lying on the sun-baked pavement.

They listen quietly, then say they don’t want to see one. 

“Rattlers,” Heady says, “can wrap around your axles and hide there, attacking when you step out of the car.” 

“Oh,” I say, feeling that gulf between us, the one whose depths I don’t want to know.

I don’t question Heady’s comment, even though I’m fairly certain it’s just another myth about a frequently-reviled animal. Instead, my mother’s voice rings in my head: if you can’t say something nice. I don’t want to argue with my neighbors; I want to go enjoy the stars. So I just nod, though in the dark they probably can’t see, and share my flashlight until we reach our rooms. Wanting to part pleasantly, I tell them we’re heading down the trail to watch stars. We say goodnight, and I walk on to the promontory. 

We sit on the bench, my husband and I, and lean back, faces skyward, two trees behind us anchoring us to earth. It’s a clear night, and the stars are full out, the Milky Way a band of brightness arcing overhead like a banner announcing the beginning of something new. Through binoculars we see the depth, the density of stars reaching back and back, the dizzying distances of lightyears above us. 

A light, behind us, and voices: someone is coming. It’s Greg and Heady, bundled now in coats, venturing out at my suggestion to watch stars. We slide over to share the bench, and my husband points out the Milky Way. 

“I’ve never seen it,” says Heady. 

“Not since I was a kid,” says Greg. 

I’m stunned; they live where they can stand in a warm dark and watch the Milky Way. Something I miss since moving north. But not, says Greg, where they live in the city. We hand them our binoculars, and they gasp at what they can now see, had not imagined being able to see. 

We sit, watch, talk about kids, jobs, fireflies. I ask if they see fireflies where they live, something else I miss from my childhood in the south. 

“Not so much anymore,” says Greg. “Not since I was a kid.”

“I miss them,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Greg.

Our talk is punctuated by a shooting star, the tail end of the Orionid meteor shower, but only Heady and I see it. Shooting stars and meteors are so quick, so ephemeral, there’s barely time to realize I’m seeing one, much less time to point it out to someone else. 

Then, as we all watch, our faces tilted upward, the skies prove me wrong: a shooting star, a meteor flares bright, disappears, then flares brilliant again. We gasp a collective gasp. The meteor has bounced off the atmosphere, flaring twice. It’s by far the longest starflare I’ve ever seen. Long enough that we all four saw it. Long enough that we all four saw it twice.

We are quiet now, a comfortable quiet, silenced by flaring starlight. We lean back against the bench, arms relaxed, coats touching. Then we stir, talk more, about San Antonio’s increasing heat, about Alaska’s cold dark. And about rattlesnakes again, Greg telling us about the rattlesnake roundup, an annual event in Texas where men pull snakes from their dens and kill them.

“That’s barbaric, antiquated behavior,” says my husband, “we should know better by now.” 

“I think there’s just too many of them,” says Greg.

“It is awfully mean,” says Heady, quickly. 

“Yes,” I say, “it is mean.”

We fall silent, none of us wanting to ruin the moment with disagreements. We’ve neared the edge of the gulf, and none of us want to see how wide it is. We want, instead, to shrink it, to make it disappear. 

So we sit and watch stars. Soon they say goodnight, and we sit longer, just us two.  Gazing upward into the shimmering of millions of lightyears, I feel a lingering warmth that we four shared something good, if only for a brief time, thanks to the Milky Way of which we all are part—a very small part, infinitesimal, nearly invisible, our lives no more than a flash of light.