Stars in an Idaho sky

This week we've been in Idaho visiting my parents. We usually only get to visit once a year and it's usually during the annual potato harvest, which is the last week in September/first week in October.

There are many things that I love about rural Idaho. Besides being the place where I was born and raised, it's everything that Seattle is not. And that's both good and bad.

It's quiet. If you stop and listen you can hear a dog bark from a neighbor's house a few miles away, or the drone of a lone car driving along the distant highway--again, miles away. And sometimes when you listen you hear nothing at all. I don't mean that the background noise is very quiet, but rather that there is no background noise.

There's space in southeastern Idaho. Space to breathe and space to live. Children have large yards. Houses are separated by fields and are often miles apart. There are few trees, which pulls the big sky to the horizon on every side. It doesn't rain too often, but when it does you can smell the soil in the air. To me, it's an enchanting scent that carries me back in an instant to simpler times.

The weather was good this year, with temperatures in the low 80s. At night the sky was crystal clear, as it usually is. I love to walk outside the house at night and look into the sky. There are stars in their billions--and you can SEE them blazoned across the heavens. In Seattle we think that we can see the stars on a clear night. But we're mostly seeing satellites and distant planets. Few stars can pierce the ever-present light pollution or penetrate the tall trees.

Things change more slowly in Idaho. The night sky hasn't changed at all--it's just like it was when I was a boy gazing up into the night. Cassiopeia is there, Cepheus, the pleades, Pegusus the mighty horse, and Draco the dragon, whose long tail wraps around Ursa Minor, the little dipper. On the end of the little dipper is Polaris, which still points the way north, and the end of the big dipper still points to it. During the fall and winter months, you can see Orion, the hunter, rise up over the southern horizon. And beyond all this is the white band of the Milky Way.
If I make it sound a bit romantic, I suppose it is. When I was a teenager, getting out of Mayberry and experiencing the city seemed a romantic notion. Now it's just a practical one. The romance is in the stars cast across an Idaho sky.