This was first published in the spring of 2005 in the magazine Adirondack Life, but I no longer have an electronic version so this is what I believe is a [nearly] final version before it went to print. Apologies for any mistakes/typos, they are mine not ALs.
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Simply fly to the “second star on the right and straight on ’til morning,” Peter Pan told the Darling children when asked how to fly to Neverland. I always felt those were sensible and clear directions. Probably because I had grown up with my own simple star-based set of directions for traveling to my own Neverland—Lake George.
It was easy to get there. You could find Lake George from almost anywhere in the country, as long as you could “follow the ladle.” That is, find the Big Dipper and follow the front two stars of its ladle in the direction it seems to be pouring. There I would find the North Star, which in my mind hung directly over our cabin at the lake.
Oh sure, I knew it wasn’t really over the lake, but when winter’s chill would finally thaw and thoughts would begin to fly toward summer, it was only natural to look out my window to the north, to Lake George, to wet bathing suits and fluffernutter sandwiches. Since I have always lived, in some way, south of Lake George, the North Star has been a constant reminder—especially when the darkness of February seems it might never end—that somewhere under it lies the lake, the Adirondacks and our camp.
The North Star is just the beginning. In my family, stargazing is an important part of growing up. My father spent many summer nights at the lake teaching me the constellations. Wrapped in one of Grandma’s old wool blankets, we would stand in the damp night grass and look up to Cassiopeia, the Pleiades and whatever planets were gracing us with their appearance that week.
The lessons were not just about the stars either. One evening when I was eight years old, around two in the morning, my parents came and woke me. (I was asserting my childhood independence by sleeping alone in one of our small cabins—ten brave feet from the main cottage.) They told me to come outside to see the Merry Dancers. I had no idea what they meant, but anything at two a.m. was just plain exciting, and so into the night I went.
When I emerged from under the cover of the trees and crossed the minefield of acorns in my bare feet, I saw many of my family members sitting on an incline in front of our main cabin. They were all staring up, and my gaze followed theirs to see the most wonderful display of northern lights. There were reds and blues and greens. The movement was constant and complicated. I was entranced.
At the time, seeing the stars and northern lights was merely exciting, but as I got older I became increasingly interested in knowing exactly what I was seeing and how I was seeing it. I was utterly intrigued by the idea that some of the stars I saw had emitted their light so long ago that they might not even exist anymore. My response to that knowledge was to shine my flashlight up into the dark night. It thrilled me to think that my small, AA-powered beam would whiz across the universe, hurtling past stars and galaxies into whatever lay beyond long after I turned it off.
As part of my growing fascination with stars and space I enlisted my younger cousins in my nighttime activities. During our childhood summers, we were mostly left alone. We knew to never swim without a buddy and to tell someone when we went hiking. The water and land were our chaperones, and we rambled about in small cousinly gangs smelling of pinesap and wet hair. As our excitement over seeing the stars and northern lights grew, we decided that the best way to monitor all the evening activities would be to sleep outside. Our parents met this announcement with no more than a smile and a nod, and we were off to design the perfect all-night setup. My father, ever the stargazing guide, wisely suggested we find a tarp on which to sleep to ward off the dew.
After a few attempts we found the perfect sleeping spot, a slab of granite left by the last glacier. From this rock we had a view north up the lake punctuated by Rogers Rock on the west and Anthonys Nose on the east. Best of all, we had a unencumbered view of the northern sky. The fact that the rock was on a distinct incline was never a problem until the next morning, when we woke up in tangled balls of damp sleeping bags and candy wrappers at the bottom of the rock, the trusty tarp acting as a sliding board to our nylon bedding.
And so we monitored the weather hoping for crisp days that we knew produced cool, bug-free, crystal clear nights. And on those nights, as darkness fell, we shivered with excitement in our sleeping bags. The stars overwhelmed us. The Milky Way cut a wide, white path across the sky.
Inevitably a dark shadow would dart by and a cousin would whisper, “Was that a bat that just flew over?!”
Someone else would answer, “No, it’s just a late-night swallow.”
We believed that, because otherwise we would be forced to think about The Time The Bat Got Tangled In Our Great Aunt’s Hair.
Mostly we tallied up sightings of meteors and satellites in a slightly competitive way.
“That’s my third shooting star!”
“Oh yeah? Well I’ve seen five shooting stars and two satellites!”
“That wasn’t a shooting star, that was a lightning bug!”
While one part of our minds would hold the number of verified sightings (two cousins had to see the meteor or satellite for it to be “official”), the other part was dreaming up what the satellites were monitoring. I held the belief, planted by my father when he was encouraging my celestial interests, that some of them were spy satellites with super photographic abilities. So when they passed overhead, we often waved just in case they were taking pictures of us.
My cousins and I are adults now. We are in school, have families and jobs, and go about our normal lives during the winter. But again, like Neverland, the air of Lake George makes everyone a little younger, a little wilder and a little more daring. A little more prone to, for example, cram three grown adults into a leaking two-person paddle boat and quietly sneak out into the middle of the lake at midnight just so we can have an unobstructed view of the whole starry sky.
We also have the responsibility to carry the tradition to the next generation. Last summer I had two new things with me at the lake: a brand-new telescope and a brand-new baby. It was our first summer with an official stargazing tool and certainly my first summer with a child.
At five weeks old, my daughter was not terribly interested in the night sky despite the fact that it was a full moon. My cousins and I more than made up for her lack of enthusiasm. With the telescope we were able to see actual craters on the moon’s surface. The moon was so clear and bright and close it seemed like it was rising out of the waters of Lake George. We also took delight in pointing the telescope into patches of “darkness” and then watching stars, previously hidden from our naked eyes, pop out like twinkle lights. And of course we gazed at the North Star, our beacon guiding us ever northward toward the lake, a small white-hot drop of fire hanging above our cabins.
Because the new telescope was so exciting I was okay with my daughter’s indifference—last summer. But it won’t be long until she is wrapped in one of the wool blankets and bustled outside before bedtime. It’s simply part of what she was born into. It’s what we were all born into, ever since my grandfather began coming to the lake when he was a boy.
A few years ago, in the early fall, my grandfather died after a full life and countless summers at Lake George. We held his funeral at the lake on a wonderfully crisp September day that he would have loved. The air was sharp and strong and the trees had all begun to flare in brilliant reds and yellows. That afternoon we had a small outdoor reception overlooking the lake. The water was a deep blue matched only by the deep blue of the sky.
And so that night, five or six of us who all had long drives back to our homes and jobs the next morning changed out of our suits and dresses and hauled out the old tarps and sleeping bags. We lay on the ground and bickered over who was being forced to sleep touching wet grass. We squealed when we felt daddy longlegs march over us. And we looked upward as we talked about the weekend’s events and what they meant and how much our grandfather would have appreciated everything about that day.
That night we set a family record —seventeen satellites and twenty-one meteorites. Following the ladle, lying under the North Star, we knew that we were home.