One night last summer, we were camped at 10,000 feet up where the air is clear, high in the
Rockies at Lost Lake, Colorado, and as the fire burned low, and only a few glowing coals
remained, we laid on our backs, all warm in our sleeping bags, and looked up at the stars.
As I felt myself falling into the vastness of the universe, I thought about things,
and places, and times.
I thought about the time my grandma told me what to say when I saw the evening star.
You know, star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.
The air is crystal clean up here, that's why you can see a million stars.
I remember a time a bunch of us were in the canyon of the Green River in Wyoming.
It was a night just like this, and we had our rafts pulled up on the bank,
and turned over so we could sleep on them. And one of the guys from New York said,
hey look at the smog in the sky, smog clear out here in the sticks.
Somebody said, hey Joe, that's not smog, that's the Milky Way. Joe had never seen the Milky Way.
So
now we saw the northern lights once, in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.
They're like flames from some prehistoric campfire, leaping and dancing in the sky,
changing colors. Red to gold, blue, violet, aurora borealis.
It's like the equinox, the changing seasons, summer to fall, young to old, then to now.
And then tomorrow.
And then everyone was asleep except me.
And as I saw the morning star come up over the mountains,
I realized that life is just a collection of memories.
And memories are like starlight,
they go on forever.