A Dark Sky

The website told me not to use my GPS, so I didn’t.  It was past midnight, and I was searching for Hovenweep National Monument on the border of Utah and Colorado.  I knew the place was extremely remote, so when I turned onto an unpaved road through an open range of cattle I thought it was possible I was still heading in the right direction.  After all, I had driven down a similar road in South Dakota to reach the Badlands.  I expected to reach my destination within twenty miles. 

The gravel road was patterned with rough grooves.  I could hear my tires launching bits of scree that clanged against the underbelly of my car.  I was driving about ten miles an hour because the road curved around several bends and climbed rolling hills.  I was entering one of the darkest places in the United States, so only my high beams illuminated my narrow path. There was a gas station thirty miles behind me and nothing in front of me but farmland.  A black cow with a white spot on its face was lying in the road.  I kept telling myself the monument would be just up ahead, and I was convinced that I had followed the directions from the National Park Service website.  After a half an hour I realized I was lost, so I turned around.

I wasn’t overly concerned because I had enough gas, food and water in case I were to have car trouble.  When I go to far-flung places, I expect to be inconvenienced.  Sometimes I feel ashamed when I merely plug in my destination into GoogleMaps.  Especially when I visit sites founded by ancient explorers, I want navigation to be part of the experience, and getting lost is a reasonable outcome for not following a robot-plotted course.

 

With all that being said, I wasn’t having a grand time because my eyes were strained from scouring the darkness for signs of kamikaze deer.  I blasted the music to help me stay awake as I drove back down the farm road until my tires hit the pavement.  I found the turn that I initially missed and followed the county roads until I reached the campground at Hovenweep.  When I turned off my headlights, my eyes began adjusting to the darkness surrounding me, and soon I could see by the greyish light of the stars.  I could see them everywhere, even on the horizon.    

The national monument qualifies as dark sky park according to the International Dark-Sky Association, a non-profit organization aiming to preserve areas unencumbered with light pollution.  In order to earn the label of a dark sky park, it helps to be far from a major city.  In addition to remoteness, special lighting must be installed where it is deemed necessary for safety and commerce reasons.

Lights should be equipped with motion-sensors and should only illuminate essential spots.  The intensity of the light should not be excessive, and the light should be pointed downward and encased with a fully-shielded fixture.  Blue emissions should be minimized as this color brightens the sky more than any other due to its higher temperature.  Low-temperature lights such as low-pressure sodium (which are commonly used for streetlights) should be used because they emit warmer colors of light.

All these measures are taken primarily for stargazing purposes.  In your average suburban backyard, you may be able to see 500 stars, but you should be able to see over 5,000 stars in a dark sky park.  Gaining dark sky status attracts visitors who want to see the primordial skies untainted by human development.  Before the light bulb was invented, the world was a very dark place at night.  If you grow accustomed to living in a moderately-populated town among the constant glow of streetlights and endless buzzing of neon signs, you may forget what it’s like to be blanketed in darkness.

Back when humans were using lanterns and pitchforks to light their way, nocturnal creatures didn’t have much to worry about.  In terms of animal evolution, light pollution is a relatively new issue that now threatens certain species.  Certain birds depend on starlight and the sun-and-moon cycle to properly time their migrations.  If they happen to fly near major cities, the light pollution could confuse them and force them off course.  Other nocturnal creatures who use darkness as cover from predators are at a disadvantage if their hiding places are exposed.  And I realize most people, like myself, don’t feel bad when a bug splats on your windshield, but this fatal attraction could potentially have severe consequences.  The decimation of insect species can have a domino effect for those animals dependent upon a plentiful bug population for food.

There were no lights at the campground except one with a motion-detector near the bathroom and my headlamp.  I paid my overnight fee and set up my camera on the picnic table.  The GoPro has a night photography option in which the aperture can stay open for thirty seconds.  The aperture works similarly to your pupil in that it takes time to absorb a changing scale of light.  I turned off my headlamp and took a few night lapse photos of the stars.  I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at. I only know basic constellations that children can recognize, and I have only an elementary understanding of astronomy.

I stared a while at the speckled sky with a lingering uneasiness hanging in the back of my mind.  Experiencing total darkness while completely alone in an extremely remote location was a novelty that I wasn’t completely comfortable with. Every now and then I would turn on my headlamp and scan the bushes I heard rustling.  A jackrabbit would saunter away when I shone the light into its eyes.  I turned the light off and resumed stargazing.

 

I was not afraid of the dark, nor did I expect to be ambushed by a mountain lion.  I was unaccustomed to the monochrome surroundings and a roofless night spent looking up.  I could hear the laughter of nearby campers that I couldn’t see.  I thought this place would do for solitude but would be better with company.  Times of limited visibility are ideal for storytelling when a voice can be detached from a moving mouth.  Self-consciousness has a tendency to dissolve while ruminating under burning orbs that have been around longer than your planet.