After the first times I needed to pee at three in the morning at the Walter family’s primitive North Fork of the Flathead property, I learned what the rest of the family already knew. I didn’t go around behind the cabins to the outhouse unless I absolutely had to. There being no guarantee that wildlife of various sizes and temperaments wouldn’t join me. Instead, I hustled out the cabin door, tried to remember other folks’ preferred tinkle spots, moved a yard or two away, and squatted.
And then looked up.
To a night sky of such clarity and light and drama that I found it hard to breathe. I’d never seen–never ever seen–the universe, the infinity as three-dimensional, the stars as iridescent, the Milky Way as unmistakable. With a frisson of motion and sound and presence there in the pure dark stillness of The Land. The Earth moving.
No planetarium has ever come close. No other place I’ve been rivaled that night view.
The International Dark Skies Initiative has long since been educating and admonishing us to realize the treasure of night skies undimmed by human light. In fact, it tracks the earth’s darkest places. Its succession of night-time aerial views of North America reveal the few remaining landscapes in our country where sodium vapor pinks, fluorescent blues, halogen headlights, and LED bulbs don’t outshine the heavens. Montana once was one of those great, black spots on the map. The land east of the Mississippi River and along the Pacific Coast showed almost continuous nighttime light. The Louisiana Purchase registered darkest—punctuated by Denver and Salt Lake City. That reality is changing.
For many years, our million Montana folks could all see the night sky. Could glory in the prickly clean light of stars, the sweep of the Milky Way, the shimmery silk of Northern Lights. We trusted each other enough to turn out all our lights at night. REA, the Rural Electrification Association, was slow to reach some of us. When they did, our wattage wasn’t all that high. We found cold dark winter evenings and light-rimmed summer nights peaceful, soothing, friendly. We could drive early interstates and two-laners through quiet hours and little traffic. Occasionally seeing the small humming glow of a tiny town or the cloud-reflected lamps of a Montana “city.” From the air, we could name our tiny settlements and dying homestead clusters. No long, fat necklaces of high beams and fast food parking lots. No metropolises that stretched to the horizons.
In some places in Montana that’s still true. Along the Hi-Line, for instance. Inside Glacier-Waterton. But not everywhere. Now our landscape of ranchettes bristles with yard lights. Our cities ooze out into their adjacent valleys and drape over prized hillsides. A land once silhouetted in moonlight is all too often dulled with domestic security poles and subdivision street lamps. Commercial corridors defined in harsh fuchsia and neighborhoods in blue and white greet us as we top a highway hill leading into town.
Montana is not alone in this steady accretion of night lights. But we ought to be among the slowest, the most cautious. Given our sparse population, we enjoyed the night’s best show longer than most. We are among the places on this earth where many of us remember what we are now losing.
What are we afraid of? What goes on in the dead of Montana nights now that our parents and grandparents did not fear or feel the need to illuminate? Is crime escalating? Have roving gangs of villains left us that much more vulnerable?
Is it the pressure we feel when the salesman tells us that our neighbor just got lights for the whole barnyard? When “as seen on TV ads” tout the security of LED motion activated garage lights? Where our planned condo associations or subdivision boards just like the look of lighted porches? What if we flipped the porch light on for our returning kids closer to their arrival time? What if we said no to the false security arguments of a condo board? What if we asked box stores to darken their parking lots? What if we made those conscious decisions?
The perils of turning nights into daylight are many. Plants and animals require earth’s daily cycle of light and dark rhythm to live. They eat and sleep and hunt and hide and reproduce in a rhythm dictated by the earth’s rotation away from and into light. Migrating birds, disordered by artificial glow, fly off course and crash into buildings. Millions of insects commit suicide in our ever-brighter lights, dying before they’ve accomplished their pollinating duties. We waste energy at a time where its production fuels global warming. Ask anyone with cataracts how deadly brilliant lights are. Even our belief that we outwit crime is false and renders us complacent.
In Montana, we are all, Native and European Americans alike, close to the millennia when fires and candles and oil lamps lighted our days. And when the moon and stars lit our nights. When the incredible nighttime expanse of universe and the mysteries that we’ve only begun to unravel brought us awe. When the stark contours of neighboring mountains set against a star-lit sky comforted us—assured us we were home.
My arthritic knees render squatting to pee in the wee hours of the morning a thing of the past. But standing out in pure North Fork dark still stays my heart. I join an enormous and endless riddle. Light from all the suns in the sky has given me life—and finally will return me to pure energy. Along with every other sentient being on the earth.
We treasure our big sky. And all too often think of it in its jaw-dropping daytime vastness—billowing clouds giving depth to a blue eternity that stretches beyond our eyes. Time, perhaps, to worship our cobalt midnight skies and their star-bright night lights. ©
