I fumble for my binoculars.  A big white truck flies past me – police car.  Binoculars.  Out the car.  I look up.  I focus – GOATSUCKERS in the night sky, their wicked unworldly mouths gaping.

Another big white truck flies by – border patrol.

I am hungry, and I stop at a gas station and ask the tattooed guy with the hair in his face about where there's an open restaurant.   

But the Ranch House is closed, so for food, it's the 7-11 for me. 

I return to the Motel, which is actually a small, clean wooden cabin.  I sit on the steps outside, and arrange my 7-11 meal, which is 3 mini-bottles of Boone's Strawberry Wine, a chicken salad, a yogurt and an energy bar. 

I message Jane about how incredible the night sky is tonight, and about the lesser nighthawks I saw at the gas station – the night birds, sometimes called goatsuckers, for the historical belief that they sucked goats dry of their milk.  Goatsuckers, like owls and bats, are an evolutionary response to the butterfly's flight into night as moths.

I had promised myself when I was younger that I would live the sort of life that would allow me to watch the night sky every now and then – to never be disconnected from this simple and humbling pleasure of life.
 
But tonight, while I enjoy peering into the Milky Way in the nighttime desert heat, I cannot help a faint melancholy sense that in my busy, modern life, quiet nights pondering the heavens are almost nonexistent.

A few months ago, I dreamed of a giant, deafening sound.  Perhaps this dream was inspired by a loud noise outside.  But in the dream, the noise was an interstellar event; whatever it was, we all knew that something terribly, terribly wrong had happened in the Universe.  The house I was in had shattered in half, so that you could see the stars outside through the roof.  And even in the stars, all was not well.  Even the stars were askew.  Something so horribly wrong in the heavens, that the end of life on Earth was certainly inevitable.

I remember this dream while I look at the sky, and I remember that these sorts of thoughts are why we look up: to consider the universe is to consider our own existence.  To peer into the heavens is to recognize that we are part of something spectacular, majestic, terrifyingly unchanging.

In the desert night, the sky is so clear that it feels as if there is no atmosphere at all; as if the stars are just away from reach. 

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