Hey Diddle Diddle

One good thing about being on the wrong road in the middle of nowhere late at night is the stars are really bright. Tonight the constellation Orion looked ever so much like a cow jumping over the moon, that I thought I would find the cat with the fiddle if I could just hang my head out the car window like a little dog laughing.

The most dazzling starry night display I've had the joy to observe was in South Dakota in 1985, the same summer as the Tyler trip. We were driving our two sleeping sons back to our cabin in Badlands National Park after an exhausting train ride in the Black Hills. We listened to KILI, the "voice of the Lakota Nation" as we drove--two tired parents afraid to break the sleepyland spell by turning off the radio. Looking at my Rand McNally, I can't say exactly what road we were on. My memory doesn't even have a road. It is so disconnected from my normal life it seems we were traveling in space. With no artificial light except the Toyota Corolla's headlights for miles in any direction, the stars seemed to hang just outside our grasp, shimmering, popping, and swirling.