the little dipper

I only recently realized that you see much more in the dark with your flashlight turned off than with it on. On, all you get is a spot of illumination that stretches, at its dimmest point, at most fifteen feet in front of you, and everything beyond that point is terrifyingly black. You mostly illuminate yourself and permit others to see you. Off, you’re blind at first, but your eyes adjust and you start to spy movements, then shapes, then details, in the dark.

I left the house tonight just before midnight for a walk. I felt brave, because being alone and outside in Palo Alto after 10 p.m. scares me. Everyone in this town is asleep or dead. It’s dark all around, and there are wide streets you can walk on for half an hour without seeing a single car go by. There are occasional streetlights, but their bulbs are filled with sodium vapor and the light they cast just passes through the bursting skins of the many sycamores on my street and creates frightening orange shadows everywhere. Even the sound of liquid amber gumballs scraping around on the ground scares me, afterhours.

Before I left, Dad equipped me with two headlights, one for my head, one for Boo’s head. I left them on until we were out of his worried sight, and then walked in the semi-dark the three long blocks to the giant field next to my middle school. Three or more football fields could fit on it. It’s latched shut in the day time when unhappy twelve year-olds are forced by their lesbian P.E. teachers to crab-walk on it – an image that brings me delight every time I recall it – but after school hours it’s free for dog frolicking. It’s next to a private elementary school. Both schools empty completely by seven and leave a long, quiet stretch of N. California Avenue more or less free of traffic until seven the next morning.

At day’s end, the California dry bake becomes a dry chill. I used to walk in the foothills at night with my bottom-weighted Pisces not talking, just shivering. I had a t-shirt on so I pulled my arms into the barrel of the shirt and clutched Boo’s leash through it. Boo was ecstatic about his unexpected walk and pranced ahead of me sniffing and peeing on bushes. We got to the field and I unleashed him and chased him so he would run around. He took off for the sprinklers on the far side of the field, hundreds of feet away.

I had come to relax my eyes. My go-to explanation for my insomnia is that light pollution in the western hemisphere has permanently damaged my circadian rhythms and made me unable to discern night from day, so I can’t sleep, and my foggy brain will never be brighter than the constant twilight it perceives. The trick, I think, is to reintroduce it to darkness. The middle of the field is the darkest place I can get to on a walk from my house, so I stood there a moment and looked up at the sky. I did what I always try to do: locate the Big Dipper and the pointer stars, measure five cup-heights, and follow my friends Dubhe and Merak to shy, elusive Polaris at the door of her inscrutable hat-shaped house.

I can never find the Little Dipper, but I like to make a sport of trying. Years ago I lay on a riverbed in New Hampshire with a nineteen year-old girl who loved mathematics and explained to me, as I searched the night sky for the Little Dipper, how a the four-dimensional equivalent of a sphere would manifest in the third dimension as a point that expands to a sphere that contracts back to a point and then disappears. The girl’s unfortunate name created the same phonemes as a phrase describing an action one might take on safari – her first name sounded like the name of an African prey animal, and her last name was pronounced “Shoots” – and this spring I saw her for the first time in five years, in a suit, interviewing at the NYU Law public interest fair – but what am I saying – oh, that I did not find the Little Dipper that night, but I found God in the combination of the night sky and the fourth dimension, and for the first time in my dumb little life I understood what “awe” meant, and I have been waiting to see it again ever since.

I told somebody once that she was my north star. In fact, I declared this, as a speech-act, in front of more than a hundred raptly attentive people at a bend in Horseshoe Creek. They cried with joy and applauded after I said this. It turned out I was lying, or exaggerating, or mistaken, because only three months later I had completely lost my bearings and gone in an entirely different direction looking for true north. I am starting to think that my hunt for the Little Dipper is a fool’s errand, because my compass will always be drawn off course by magnetic declination, or because my plastic-capped eyes have deteriorated beyond repair and can simply no longer see, or because the Little Dipper is an invisible fiction. Or I am just faithless, and an inconstant person cannot find a north star.

I didn’t find it tonight. I stood there for a few long minutes, and my eyes started seeing streaks and constellations where there were none. Stars emerged and then faded. Blinking lights traveled the long slow distance between takeoff and landing. The bottom fifth of the sky to the south was almost white from the lights in San Jose, and a car drove the lonely stretch in front of the field and flooded me out with its headlights anyway. Boo ran back toward me and I dropped to my knees and wrestled with him. He batted me with his front legs but then I accidentally stepped on his foot and he cried loudly and retreated from our game, so I apologized to him, leashed him, and led him off the field and back toward home.