Winter stars

The sky last night lay open and bright, and as I gingerly walked across the icy parking lot, I could see Orion shining through the bare branches of the trees.  He felt like an old friend.

I rarely pay attention to the stars in the city.  Occasionally a bright planet catches my attention, or a crescent moon.  Usually, though, the stars lie beyond the glare of streetlights and windows, dimmed like tarnished silver.  Something's lost to a world where the stars are dimmed:  awe, I think, and not a little perspective.

For several years in my late teens, we lived at Work Point in Esquimalt -- a neighborhood of Victoria B.C.  Work Point formed the west side of the entrance to Victoria Harbour and looked south over the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Port Angeles and the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.  Victoria lies in the rain shadow of the Vancouver Island Mountain range and enjoys unusually clear skies for coastal British Columbia.  In fact, because of its clear skies, it became the home of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in 1918.  Furthermore, the mild winter temperatures -- rarely below zero, even in January and February -- allow stargazing in relative comfort, compared to other parts of the country.

We enjoyed a particularly fine view of the night sky from Work Point, looking south to where the familar constellations hung above the water and the far dark mountains.  I would sometimes go down to the rocky shoreline after dark and wedge myself into some crevice out of the breeze.  I would pick out Orion, identify bright Rigel and red Betelgeuse, look down and left for sparkling, blue Sirius, and then scan up and right for the fuzzy Pleiades cluster.  The Milky Way arched across the heavens.  I could feel my insignificance in the enormity of things, and it was a release.

Often, too, if the sea was still, I could listen to the tugs towing their log booms in and out of the harbour (in those days, log booms still stretched along the west side of the harbour).  The sounds carried so clear and sharp across the water, that I could listen to the conversations of the crewmen mixed with the steady beat of the diesels and the lapping of waves.  In contrast to the heavens stretching above, the sounds of other human beings going about their lives seemed very intimate.  I almost felt drawn on to the decks and into the red, warm glow of the wheelhouses.