Cold Night in Cambria
Last Friday night, Dylan, Brandon, Cody, and I played Hearts (a man’s game) at Cody’s. The game stretched on to the wee hours of the morning. And so it passed that I drove home at 3:00 AM.
The night was bitterly cold, just below freezing, and the moonless sky was crystal clear and full of stars. On a whim, I turned right on Hwy 1 instead of left, and drove south for fifteen minutes or so. No cars, no animals. I felt I was the only one awake in the wide cold world.
When I finally got home and stepped out of the garage, I looked up. The night sky was aglow with stars. There were the bright stars you can see everywhere but Los Angeles. And there were stars between the stars that fill in the outlines of the constellations. Details like Orion’s upraised club were so obvious - of course that’s a hunter in the stars. And then the stars between the stars between the stars, and you can’t believe how dense they are, and there really are seven sextillion of them. And then the stars between the stars between the stars, the stardust, because everywhere you looked it was never completely black. And I nearly fell to my knees, so struck was I with the beauty.
In a few short weeks I’ll be leaving for San Diego again, and with me I’ll take the memories of cold, clear nights, and the rain, and walking along the bluffs in the afternoon, and the fog in the evening.
Maybe in a decade or two I’ll come back to Cambria, just like I went back to Los Gatos. I wonder what I’ll find. I wish I could stop time and hold onto what I have, because my life right now is so amazing that I feel it can only go down from here.
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:15 pm
I giggle every time I see your hideous ugliness note.
But being able to do that every so often, step outside our busy lives and worlds and simply look at the sky. And it’s stunning, isn’t it? It’d be nice if we could see that from our backyard in SD/LA/SF, but eh…. it’s a tradeoff.