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One night... many, many summers ago, we were camped... at 12,000 feet, up where the air is still clear, high in the Rockies, at Lost Lake, Colorado. And as the fire burned down low...and only a few glowing coals remained, We laid on our backs, all warm in our sleeping bags, and looked up at the stars. And as I felt myself falling, out into the blackness of the night...I thought about things...
I thought about the time my Grandma told me what to say, when you see the evening star You all remember... "Star light", she said, "star bright, first star I've seen tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish, I wish tonight." You know the air is crystal clean up here... that's why you can see a million stars spread out across the sky... almost like a gigantic cloud of stars... I remembered another night, in the canyon of the Green River, in Wyoming... and we had our rubber boats pulled up on the bank and turned over so we could sleep on 'em... and we were layin' there lookin' up at the stars that night too... and one of the guys from Los Angeles said, hey, look at that smog in the sky... smog clear out here in the sticks... and somebody said, "hey Joe, that's not smog, that's the Milky Way, it's a hundred billion stars, it's our galaxy"... Joe had never seen the Milky Way, because of the lights from the big city ... And we saw the northern lights once ...on the summit of Uncompahgre, 14,309 feet above sea level... they were like flames from some prehistoric campfire, leaping and dancing in the sky, and changing colors... red, gold, blue, violet... Aurora Borealis, The Northern Lights... they were like the equinox, the changing seasons... summer to fall, young to old, then to now... And then, everyone was asleep, except me... and as I saw the morning star come up over the mountain, I realized at last, that life is simply a collection of memories... but memories, my friends, are like starlight, because memories go on forever. |
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