Perseid

Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport

A friend of mine headed off to Africa a few weeks ago to hike Mt. Kilimanjaro. It's crazy to imagine that from our poky little airport here in Bozeman, you can make it all the way to one of the highest peaks on the African continent. Moving 500 miles per hour at 40,000 feet is standard fare these days, but when I fly, it usually takes a day or two for my mind-blown brain to catchup with the rest of me at our final destination.

http://inouganda.com/mt-kilimanjaro/

So it was with my friend when she returned from her adventure, delirious from dancing through time zones for days upon days.

On the evening she returned, I stopped by her house to drop off a treat and found her curled up on the trampoline, buried under kids and dogs and blankets, staring up at the Perseid meteor shower shooting across the sky.

http://www.moonshineink.com/calendar/2012-perseids-meteor-shower-camp-out

She'd just shot across the sky herself. Thanks to an app on my phone that maps all of the things glowing in the night above, I could see that she wasn't the only one. The space station whizzed by, and a few satellites, not to mention the sharp glowing streaks of streams of meteors.

I returned home after a few bounces with her crew and spread a tablecloth down next to our pond, stretching out on the scratchy dry grass that poked through the fibers to catch a bit more of the show. My only companions, (I hoped, we'd had bears visit earlier in the week and a skunk just this morning,) were the chickens and the dogs, and I felt like a very little being out there in the field.

I love the sense of scale that living here offers. The vast landscape soundly puts to rest any theories of human dominance; the mountains, glaciers, and dinosaur bones - relics of millions of years of life - bring quick perspective to the average human lifespan.

When I was growing up, my family had a sailboat and sometimes we would go out for a few nights at a time. We sailed on the Chesapeake Bay, which is decidedly ungrandiose: a gentle and reassuring body of brackish water — not too deep, nor wide. I felt safe on the bay, but as a child of Washington D.C. during the unrest of Perestroika and the eventual end of the cold war, I had plenty of boogeymen to keep my company. On my walks home from the bus stop after school, I devoted a good bit of time thinking about the (imaginary?) bombs aimed straight at our nation's capital. (Other children of DC in the 80's confirm that this was a very common fear.) I needed no reminder from the night sky to confirm my powerless place in the universe.

Every now and then after the adventures of a day on the Chesapeake came to an end, my dad would drag a few sleeping bags to the bow, bring out the short wave radio, clamp a wire from its antenna to the mast to improve the reception, and bring scratchy, unfamiliar voice and sound to the imaginary Russia that I had in my head.

I knew I didn't understand - not the language or the concepts - but I liked getting a taste of the mystery, and I liked doing it with my dad at my side.

My dad is younger in this picture than I am right now.