In the Arms of the Milky Way by Laura J. Oliver

At the airport, I can’t believe I don’t have to take off my shoes or present a clear bag of toiletries. Last time I came through security, we did all of that, and I was so tired that when the TSA agent asked me if I had any liquids in my bag over 3.5 ounces, I said with a sigh, “Not really.”

“Not really” gets you pulled out of line and everything in your bag scrutinized, including twisting your lipstick up and down several times and the throwing away of your nearly-empty bottle of moisturizer. 

But I’m welcoming the stress of travel in search of the Milky Way. 

I live on the lush, closed landscape of the East Coast, and I long for change, to see the wide expanse of sky that the West affords. I want mountains and star fields from horizon to horizon, and to see the spiral arms of the Milky Way rise. I want to see the Orion Spur glowing distinctly between the Perseus and Centaurus arms of our galaxy, visible avenues embracing the band of stars we call home.

With the vast distances of space visible overhead, I long to stand where dinosaur remains still litter the landscape, to stand under the evidence of cosmological time, and on the evidence of geological time. Both are incomprehensible, try as I might to take them in. I search infinite time and distance as if for a soulmate. 

I think I am searching for God. 

The mountains that ring Salt Lake City are still snowcapped in late April, beautiful sentries we leave behind as we drive south to Moab. Mile after mile, canyon walls and massive bluffs expose layered lines of sediment that have been tilted up from the valley floor. I come to understand this is not because of tectonic plate subsidence, but because as vast salt deposits beneath a prehistoric lake dissolved, the land sank into the empty spaces as if someone had depressed one end of a seesaw, causing the other end to rise.  

The canyon walls are thick and massive in some places, and in others they have been worn away to what geologists call fins — slices of rock that have eroded into weird, improbable shapes. Gigantic multi-ton boulders rest on top of delicate spindles. Arches have created graceful bridges, and windows to forever have been worn open in solid rock walls. 

At the end of a four-hour drive, we arrive at the Red Cliffs Lodge, which sits right on the Colorado River. Beyond the lodge, distant bluffs are black in early morning shadow but will change color throughout the day—brilliant red at noon and then as the sun’s rays lengthen towards evening, these rock walls turn rose, then amethyst, then as if someone turned up the light just before turning it out, they become a brilliant, peach-orange, blushing in the mirror of the river beneath them before they are extinguished by night. Like the sky, like you, they are ever- changing and always perfect. 

A cowboy appears on horseback along the riverbank with a phalanx of dogs. Apparently, lady cows are kept on one side of the Colorado here, and boys are on the other, but an enamored bull has gone rogue and is swimming all-out to reach the girls. 

The cowboy tries to lasso the animal from his horse, and a tussle ensues. The dogs get involved. I watch the excitement from my patio, rooting for the bull who is now immersed in the river up to his massive shoulders, staring dispassionately at the frustrated cowboy throwing rocks at him while riding up and down the bank. Finally, kayakers come along and nudge the bull toward shore. 

At 10:00 pm, after consulting the weather, timing the Milky Way’s rise, and the phase of the moon, we head out for a nearly 2-hour drive to Canyonlands National Park, the largest state park in Utah, aiming to get to the darkest viewing area, Island in the Sky, close to midnight. We wonder if, with other stargazers in town, there will be room to park, but after the first 30 minutes en route, there is no other sign of life than this car and these headlights. As we close in on midnight, the utter blackness is unnerving. Maybe the other starwatchers got there before sunset, as guidebooks suggested. The car is our spaceship; the lifeless landscape is Mars.

We enter the park without a gatekeeper. If you want to wander these 527 square miles alone at night, no one is going to stop you. The road twists deeper and deeper into the park’s interior, and when we get to Island in the Sky, to our surprise, there is no one there at all. Just us. 

As we park, we despair the brightness of a waxing crescent moon. Even at only 30 percent full, it casts moon shadows so opaque that the walkway fence posts and railings appear like black paint on the pavement. The silence absorbs us.

We get out of the rental car—a massive Ford Expedition–and look up at the stars. I cover the moon with my hand. Eventually, I lie down to look up and wait for our eyes to adjust. More and more stars appear. We wait for the Milky Way as if for a guest who may have been held up in traffic— estimated time of arrival: after midnight. 

But there is no appearance, no rising smudge on the horizon. Instead, a white mist rims the valley, and a partial moon washes the sky. Overhead, the Lyrid meteor shower sends shooting stars across the void of space every few minutes, and we gasp as each is gone faster than a wish can form.

It’s cold. 

I have traveled 2,038 miles, taken a week off work, spent a fortune on rentals, parking, restaurants, and a kennel back home, for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to see where we are in the universe. To try to take in, in a felt-sense, my place in it.

Am I looking for God or simply looking for home? Is there a difference.

The minutes tick by. Who’s going to call it? This was my quest. It’s mine to surrender. 

I know logically that I can try again. My brother-in-law owns a legacy farm in Virginia where Woodland Indians, and Archaic Indians before them, gathered for thousands of years. It has a wide open plain, an ancient riverbed open to the sky, miles from any town. My sister says I can see the Milky Way there. My next-door neighbor says I can visit them at their house on Nantucket and see it there. 

It’s going to be another two-hour drive back to the lodge, and I’m sleepy. It’s 1:00 am now. 

I thank the sky for being beautiful, I thank the moon for having dimmed her light. I thank the silence for its gift of omission, and I thank God for the privilege of my unending search. For how things don’t work out sometimes. Because gratitude is not situational. It trusts in what is to come, even in the dark of night. 

 I stand up. “We should head back,” I say, then catch my breath. 

A single star has dislodged from the firmament above and falls from the sky—not a pinprick shooting across the ceiling of night, but a flaming ball falling, falling, falling–like a cup of fire all the way to earth, close enough to catch.

Alone in the Canyonlands, no one else on the planet could have seen it but us. It extinguishes itself yards from where we are standing, gone as magically as it appeared. 

I didn’t find the Milky Way, but from incomprehensible time and the vastness of space, a piece of heaven found me.