One of the worst mistakes we can make in life is not to be alive enough, aware enough, of the magic in simple things. My daughter, Sarah, now a teenager, reminded me of that lesson a few years ago and I hope I’ll never forget.
It is a midwinter’s Sunday night, sometime after supper, and I find myself walking slowly on a country lane near home, pondering this mighty question:
“Daddy, is there really a sheriff’s star?”
The question comes from a soft, eight-year-old voice connected invisibly to a small, bemittened hand that grasps my big, bare hand. I have to listen closely to catch all the words, some of which are directed at boot-tops.
Sarah Katherine is starwalking with her Dad.
Her voice is barely audible over the shuffling and padding of our footsteps in the rural quiet, a chill westerly breeze behind us. “The kids at school all draw their stars like a sheriff’s star, and they say there’s a real one in the sky,” she says.
Now I cannot say for sure that there is no sheriff’s star in the sky. An answer to that question is not listed in my Dad’s Book of Astronomy for Kids. And I certainly don’t know everything, despite what Sarah Katherine may think. But I tell her that I don’t think there is such a so-named star.
You have to be prepared for that sort of inquiry when you dare to say, “I’m going for a nightwalk; anyone want to come with me?”
The instant race of light footsteps across the kitchen floor above my head told me that someone was eager to go. Sarah. After a few minutes spent wrestling with her leggings, coat, stocking cap, mittens, and scarf, we set out.
“Daddy, this is funner than sittin’ around the house,” Sarah says, talking faster than we are walking.
“I hear the wind,” she adds quickly. It is moaning softly through the high-voltage lines well overhead. The lines march across the neighbors’ farms and tower over the local country lanes on tall, gangly steel skeletons and mighty wooden poles.
We also hear the buzzing of supercharged electricity as it bolts through the power lines. We crane our necks far back to see the crossarms and the insulators—way, way up there, almost to the stars.
“Daddy, are we going as far as Spooky Tree?” Yes, to Spooky Tree and beyond.
Spooky Tree, so named by Sarah, is a gnarly old black walnut. It is the sole survivor of its kind along this otherwise barren stretch of farm lane. Its twisted, weather-beaten limbs stand out starkly in the night light. I’ve told Halloween stories around its trunk.
It is a perfect night, the starry pinpoint sparkles of diamonds dotting a velvet sky. The air is cold— crisply, not uncomfortably, so. Sarah is well bundled. Her rubber bootheels drag on the macadam of the lane—clop, clop, clop.
Two small mittens surround my cold hand. “I’ll keep your hands warm, Daddy.”
Presently I begin a primer lesson on celestial navigation. I point out the Big Dipper.
“See?” I say, dropping to one knee and using my favorite walking stick, a wrinkly old piece of tree root from Pennsylvania, as a pointer. “Those stars there. It’s like a big pot with a long crooked handle. See how they go?” More pointing and gesturing. Our eyes by now are well attuned to the starlit dark.
“And those two stars at the front edge of the pot,” I say, “they point right up at the North Star—right there! That’s North. And the North Star is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper. It’s like a small pot. See how it pours into the big pot?”
“Uh-huh, Daddy. I see it.” We walk on.
“Can we keep walking longer, Daddy?”
“Daddy, I like to make things out of the stars by connecting them.” So have adults, I tell her.
We see Orion, the Hunter, right overhead in the southern sky. Orion’s great Belt is easy to pick out, as is the tip of his sword and his hunting bow. Below and left is Sirius, the Dog Star. Sirius is Orion’s dog.
“Like Blondie is our dog, Daddy?” Yes, sort of.
We see the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, and I talk about the lost sister in the myth. Sarah doesn’t understand myths, but she feels bad for the lost “girl.”
We head for the bridge over Muskellunge Creek by Longanbach Farm. We call it the “crick,” not “creek.”
The creekwater twinkles in the waxing, three-quarter moon and chuckles as it pours over the rocks. Its animation is inspirational: “Moonsparkles on the water, Daddy. See them?”
We check the water on both sides of the bridge. A mild spell has thawed the water and the creek flows in good health.
Presently, a light haze drifts in under the moon, forming a big ring in the moonlight.
I point out Jupiter and Mars, and how they follow about the same path as the sun across the sky. The two planets are both inside the ring around the moon. I tell how the ring means wet weather is coming. My prediction is accepted as if gospel. Weather forecasters should have it so good.
We retrace our way back toward home, but Sarah, vowing she’s not cold, asks to continue. “Just a little more, Daddy.”
We head down toward “our bridge,” which crosses the Muskellunge. The haze has slipped away on the wind and the moonlight again is sharply bright. Our shadows, cast down from bridge to water, stand out starkly. We see more moonsparkles.
As we turn for home, I see—make that feel—a shadow cross our path. I look up and back quickly.
“Sarah, look!” I whisper hoarsely. She turns and sees the dark form of a great bird gliding silently down the creekbottom, guided as precisely along the meanders of the creek as if it were on rails.
It is a great horned owl, a flying tiger, out on a night hunt.
I tell Sarah how the big owl has specially designed feathers, which allow it to glide in perfect silence and catch stuff, like mice, to eat. My pupil drinks it in, her mitten tightening its grip.
The talk winds down. There is much for each of us to absorb. I find myself thinking of other starwalks, especially one when I took Sarah’s older brothers, Andy and Aaron, out another winter night years ago.
37Aaron must have been about three then. He was too small to negotiate the deep-plowed furrows on the Dickman Farm, so I ended up carrying him on my shoulders. This was a cross-country starwalk to a special place, another “spooky tree”—a big old cottonwood, another lone sentinel of the farmland.
I especially remember telling the boys to keep the flashlight turned off, to let them learn how well their eyes can see at night if given the chance. I remember, too, taking them right up to the old tree, letting them finger the rough bark and search and probe its texture with their fingers.
The next spring, a man with a bulldozer pushed the old tree to the ground. Then he cut it up and burned it to ashes, its history gone up in so much smoke. I hope that tree will live in the boys’ memories as it has in mine.
My reverie is broken with Blondie’s barking. Her incredible dog ears have caught the clopping of our feet on the road, and she lets Sarah and me know she’s unhappy that she wasn’t asked along.
Too soon, our walk is over. But I’ll come to find out later that a starfire was lit this night in a little girl. She talked for days about our starwalk, and now regularly asks to go again.
By chance, after my young starwalker was asleep, I happened on a passage from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s classic, The Little Prince. For me, it was a wonderful coincidence, a perfect ending to a perfect evening.
“All men have the stars,” the passage went, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems... You—you alone—have the stars as no one else has them.”
“Starwalking with Sarah” by Steve Pollick, from Starwalking with Sarah & Other Essays, copyright © 1994 by Toledo Blade Co. Used by permission of The Blade.