North Dakota 1978

Old and rough looking, his car sat in parking lot. In the middle of nowhere, in the heart of God’s land the rusting behemoth rested a couple of hundred yards from his campsite.  Out here miles from anywhere, the car sat cooling in the moonless night. The old beast’s windows were wet with dew.   On a North Dakota night, very few cars sat here in the lot. Early summer and the camping season was off to a slow start. When you are parked at the National Park in Medora, North Dakota, you are a long way from anywhere and a stone’s throw from eternity.

In the darkness of this night it was hard to see on first glance the car’s caved in left rear door. Injured from a prior owner’s failure to observe and react to changing conditions on the road, the metal was twisted and bent in a concave shape with ragged edges and asymmetrical peaks and valleys.  Fixed by the accident in a permanently closed status, the door’s mangled metal had been shoddily painted over with a ruddy colored rust inhibiting spray paint. What a classic low rent paint job. The large blotch of color looked just like dried blood.

Having started its life as a white four door family sedan with a huge old V-8, the car had taken one too many wrong turns.  Instead of being a comforting vessel to carry a nuclear family to church on Sunday, to carry that same four-person unit out for a Friday night all you could eat buffet and to transport Dad to work Monday through Friday, the big hulking sedan had become a vehicle that epitomized the crazed moments that were passing in America. Everyone it seemed was on the road. Young men and women were out to find themselves and America.

In the daylight the car’s true craziness was clearly evident to even a casual observer. Down the right side, across the front fender, the two doors and the rear fender, almost from headlight to taillight written in black spray paint was the phrase, “Into the Unknown”. Across the behemoth’s trunk were so many bumper stickers. The quilt of crazy colored messages made it hard for those following the car not to be distracted. 

One sticker was green and white and said Equal Pay for Equal Work. Another was a skull wearing a rose garland, the telltale sign of a cult affirmation, the occupants were clearly Deadheads. A third had a diving flag and the question Gone Down Lately? Tucked into the crazy quilt of political and music stickers was the one that was sure to get the vehicle stopped, again and again, I Brake for Hallucinations.

As he stood outside the little two-person tent the vehicle’s owner sucked on a Marlboro.  The night was growing cold as nights are wont to do out here on the great plains even in summer. Time now was pushing on 10 PM. Darkness ruled in every direction.  The warmth of the smoke and the calming effect of the nicotine were comforting. He snugged up his old field jacket as he crushed the glowing ember of his spent butt beneath his shoe.

Most people, just like the driver, had cooked their meals hours ago.  Hot dogs and canned baked beans had been cooked on his Coleman white gas stove. A simple meal, it was good enough for this night. All the pans and tin dishes together with the silverware had been washed at the communal campground pump and then stashed back in the car. Belly full, sleep would soon follow.

Silent and still the night wrapped itself around the young man as tight as any quilt he had every clutched on a cold winter’s eve.  He could not see very well his camp fire having long gone out. Shuffling carefully over to the picnic table set there on the campsite, he poured his self some water from the old aluminum water jug. The jug was an ancient relic but it was free.  Thus, he was using it on this spur of the moment trip across the north country. His shin having found the table the young man turned and sat on its bench. He threw his head back and looked up.

And then he looked up. He looked up expecting darkness. He looked up and saw so much more than he ever expected. He looked up and he realized how lost he was.

The lid of the water jug was quietly set upon the table. He closed his eyes and blinked several times.  Then he worked to focus his eyes. Still, he could not comprehend what he was seeing.  Spread out across the sky for horizon to horizon were thousands, millions, billions maybe of stars. Dim and bright, pulsing and fixed in intensity, the stars he saw were arrayed in steams of light. Weaving twinkling patterns spread out in so many directions.  

The depth of the star field on this black moonless night filled his senses. When was a kid he used to look at star charts, but when he went outside at night his sky was never so densely populated and those charts illustrated.  But this, well the mass of stars lighting up his field of vision tonight was denser and more expansive that any color plate those magazines and encyclopedias ever showed. 

With a slowing in his breathing, he sat as still has he possible could. With his irises as wide as they could be, he drank it all in.  No, despite those preteen forays into astronomical readings, he could not name the constellations.  Neither could he name specific stars save the north star, Polaris. What he could do now was let the light of a universe wash over him.  What he could do now was experience night on the great plains as people a hundred or a thousand years before had.  What he could do now was be humbled by the night sky he had never had the chance to look up and see before.

He sat there for almost an hour barely moving, barely breathing.  Finally filled with the wonder of the night he crawled off and into his sleeping bag.  He would never again have that total and complete sense of wonder at the night. This moment on this road trip would be a touchpoint of his life.