It was no use trying to see the Green Comet last night; the light of the moon, now near half-full, was far too bright.
Worse, just after midnight, multiple official vehicles raced up and down the highway, spotlighting our land with blinding streaks of light that have nothing to do with shooting stars, but plenty to do with stampeding the entire elk herd back up to the mountains.
They weren’t after the elk, of course, nor anything specifically to do with our land. Yesterday morning, we heard the sound of helos overhead yet again, and local gossip reported a State Police search for a missing person, a locution that was more likely code for “suspect.” Based on the vehicles’ subsequent behavior in the earliest hour of this morning, they were searching not for something, but someone, racing back and forth, heading up a side road across the highway, stopping at the Y-intersection south of us and training their blinding spotlights on the road ahead for seemingly endless minutes.
The peace of the elk herd’s feed was just an incidental casualty of it all, as was our own sleep.
Of course, there’s nothing in the news about it this morning; there never is. Certain classes of people and certain actions are protected by local media and kept under wraps; others involve people said media consider too unimportant to cover. None of that is speculation, by the way; it’s been proven over and over and over again for years now, and the lack of journalistic ethics is readily apparent weekly in the coverage given to the people owners and staff think matter compared to that of the people they don’t.
But that’s neither new nor news here, and any possibility of fixing it remains as elusive as the Green Comet, utterly unwilling to be found.
It’s not always that way here, at least with regard to the celestial visitors (colonial ones are another matter entirely). Even on the dullest of nights, partially-clear skies here will deliver a spectacular light show. On a clear, cold night in the depths of the midwinter dark? It’s possible to see worlds beyond our own, to see what existed in the oldest of days moving forward into a future we can only imagine and dream. After all, the most ancient paths are made of ice and stardust and light.
It has to do with the size and depth and age of the universe, with the arc of the light in the context of age and trajectory and velocity. It’s theory far beyond my comprehension, except on the most basic level, and yet I don’t need to understand the details to accept the reality of it. For me, the presence of such celestial spirits is enough: of shooting stars and meteor showers and comets older than time, harbingers of events we may not live long enough to see, yet no less true for that.
The comet in the image above is one such harbinger, one whose name would be hijacked by colonial interests and whose existence would be hijacked by a colonial suicide cult. None of that held the slightest relevance for Wings when he captured the image from a vantage point high up in the mountains at dusk. An icy arc of the most ancient stardust light, its existence depended not at all on the so-called “discoveries” of white men, although their names are now hung firmly around its metaphorical neck — are, not were, because the comet is scheduled to pass this way again more than twenty-three hundred years from now, whether the Earth remains in its current (and populated) form or not. Its alleged “discovery” was in July of 1995, but it’s likely that Wings took this photo some two years later, sometime early in 1997, the year of its perihelion, or closest passage to the sun that is the center of our solar system. He shot this one on film, almost a decade before he would buy his first digital camera, and it was one of those images in which light, color, distance, and perspective all came together perfectly.
From the looks of today’s sky, it’s unlikely that we shall have any more than the faint brush strokes of cloud visible at the horizon in the photo; indeed, we may not even have that much by the time today’s trickster winds, ferocious and bitterly cold, are done with the few scattered puffs of white still visible at midday. But we will have the brilliance of the stars to guide us — the golden glow of the moon, too, still not quite half-full. I think it’s unlikely the Green Comet will show itself in such a bright sky.
But perhaps we will have the best of last night’s illuminating visitors, after the spotlights had departed (and the elk, too): a shooting star, long of tail and visibility, too. I had already returned to bed, hoping in vain for sleep’s return, but Wings was still standing at the window when the meteor made its transit over the land upon which the elk had just left their hoofprints. Not, perhaps, as old as the comet, but still an icy arc of stardust light, and still more ancient than anything our world can conceive.
And it has visited us, here and now.
~ Aji
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