July was uncharacteristically dreary here, and the NEOWISE comet came and went without a sighting.
But August brightened up considerably. I was ready for star-gazing and preparing for the Perseids. My friend Yang and her husband happened to be up for a weekend of hiking, and over a “socially distanced” dinner on the deck, a very bright star caught Yang’s eye in the southeast, just as the sky darkened. A google search told us it was Jupiter, with a fainter Saturn just to its lower left. I checked in with my friend Mike, an astronomy buff who confirmed my suspicion. He told me to pull out my binoculars and that I should even be able to see a few of Jupiter’s moons. It was, in a word, amazing!
Damn if we weren’t channeling Galileo.
A few days later I geared up for the Perseid meteor shower with another friend, Jeannette. By 9:30 pm, with planets, constellations and the Milky Way effulgent, a few meteors started to appear. I lay on the hammock and gazed overhead, letting the occasional streak of light singe a path along my retina. Greedy for more, I repeated the process in the early morning hours.
By the weekend, the meteors had dissipated and the temperature had soared. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, I was awaked by the sound of motorcycle speeding up Route 1. As I tried to settle back into sleep, I notice a soft pink burst of light underneath the cloud cover. I went out on the deck to look in all directions and concluded that this light show was another gift of the cosmos. A radar map provided the answer: a thundershower in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Santa Cruz. I crawled back under the covers, watched and waited with anticipation. Over the course of the next hour, the sky lit up brilliantly and let loose with the longest riff of thunder I had ever heard. Spectacular.
But also, devastating. The lightening show that rocked the Bay Area that night also ignited dozens of small fires, now enormous and terrifying, encroaching on communities and exhausting firefighters. A subsequent burst of lightening on Tuesday brought a fire to the Point Reyes National Seashore, near the Woodward trail. I spent a restless night, signing up for various alerts, seeking out information, and offering to help at the evacuation center being set up at the West Marin Elementary School down the street. It was difficult to sleep that night, and the subsequent nights, knowing that a fire was raging just a few miles from me and that a gust of wind carrying an ember could easily set a field ablaze.
Yesterday brought new sights and sounds – of airplanes and helicopters as they head for the fire. We humans like to think we are in control, and climate change has made clear that our power is indeed tremendous. But when I witness the meteors, the planets, the stars, the lightening, even the fires, I am grateful that there are forces so much bigger than us, forces that will continue to be here forever. How long will we still be here to revel in them?
