The Perseids

remember to look up

Last weekend we went to see the Perseids for our anniversary. It’s a meteor shower that peaks about this time each year. You have to go to a very dark place to see it, and even then, you may not. We had wanted to go for many years and finally drove to the international dark park in Champaign County, Illinois. It’s so dark we initially blew right past it. There are no lighted signs. The only indicator we were in the right place was a red-tinted flashlight, held by a man setting up his camera in the parking lot. You use a red flashlight so as not to be a distraction to others. We didn’t have one, so we took a regular flashlight and got a piece of red felt at Walmart and tied it on with dental floss. It worked just fine. You don’t need a telescope, either, though some folks came and set up theirs.

We pulled in about 9 pm and stayed past 11 pm. It’s dark enough to see the Milky Way out there, and the meteors are unlike anything I’d seen, almost untrustworthy, like light skipping across the waves, flashes here and there, or else big streaks, without warning. The parking lot filled with a few more people. Some families came and went. Couples and families and groups of friends, more folks with red flashlights, all hoping to witness this strange phenomenon. We saw maybe thirty or forty while standing there, starting adjacent to Orion’s Belt—where we were told to look that night—and shifting as the planet rotated across the sky.

I do not recommend the place where we stayed. The tub ran all night long, inside the plumbing, inside the wall of the shower, like maybe there was a cavern below and we were just a few drips away from the slab giving way beneath us. There was no way to turn off the drip, which sounded maybe like a stream. It was also almost impossibly dirty. I checked the bed for bedbugs, thankfully there were none. It was pretty inexpensive. But it almost didn’t matter one way or another. We went and saw some stars. The dark park was sufficiently dark. Possibly even too dark. We drove home sleep-deprived but happy. I barely looked at my phone.

Lately it’s like this: I need a place to turn off my brain, to uncouple from absolutely everything. I don’t know if it’s post-covid brain or just waning resiliency or a kind of autistic burnout, but I do not want to go anywhere or do anything. I tweeted this recently and my publisher’s account replied with “me too.” I hope whoever’s running the account lately is okay. My book is hard and dumb. The news cycle feels especially crushing lately. Climate change is of course horrible. I keep watching videos of the fire on Maui, how people jumped in the ocean to live. We get regular updates on the hurricane in California from my brother-in-law, who lives in LA. I jokingly-but-not tell my therapist that I’m gardening and engineering my way through the apocalypse, as a way to channel my climate anxiety and keep writing. I recently ordered a bunch of deep trays to start native plants, my own little native plant nursery on wire racks in the backyard. The deeper trays are better, I’ve been told, because native prairie plants have extensive root structures. That makes sense. Our front yard, near Lake Michigan, is mostly sand. So far we can barely grow grass in there, which is a big part of why I’m covering everything with cardboard and mulch and starting over. They call it lasagna gardening. I hope it works, but even if it doesn’t, that’s probably okay too; I hate the grass. I ordered a rain barrel for free from our local water reclamation district. I need to get a bigger hose to attach it to our downspout, but I think it’ll do okay. We have a condenser dryer in our apartment and I may do something weird, like collect its water for plants in the basement this winter, as I simultaneously try to build out a little dedicated ceramics studio space. I may be entering my plant era, as the kids say.

In spite of everything, the Perseids are still there. It feels like a magic trick, or else prehistoric, which they’re not—I looked it up, the Perseids have only been doing this for about a thousand years, tied to the Swift-Tuttle comet, but that seems old enough.

Yesterday, I filed edits for a piece I feel like I’ve been working on for a thousand years. I hope that this is it, that I can share it soon, but it’s been hard for me for various reasons, mostly personal. Among them, I am not really a reporter. I’m a competent pitcher, but if I land the piece, I have to write it, and then it’s too late. In this case, someone approached me, and I was so flattered, so honored, and so much a people pleaser—that I said yes. My friends know that I need to stop doing this. Next time, I have to decline. They all say this. Unless it’s an essay, not reported, or else the sort of reported piece where I get to go and see and experience things and then write about them. That version tends to work out for me. But it’s very hard to visualize which information I really need if I’m just talking to people over the phone. Where the important points are. How to synthesize many differing opinions.

It’s okay. I will get through whatever needs to be done, whether for this reported piece or some other one. But I may also withdraw more, out of necessity. The Perseids felt like a start to something. My book is due in January, and unless the world ends between now and then (and even if it does), I better get on it.