I am thirty-four years old and I have lived, in sequence, in Chicago, Seoul, and New York City. I have never lived anywhere that was not a major metropolitan area. I grew up eating 24-hour ramen, hailing cabs at 2 AM, sleeping to the sound of traffic and sirens. This is normal life to me. This is what I know.
I had also, until eighteen months ago, never seen the actual night sky. I mean I'd seen sky at night — the orange-gray smear of light pollution that passes for darkness in big cities, with perhaps three or four stars punching through if you squinted. I knew, in the abstract, intellectual way you know things you've never experienced, that there were billions of stars up there. I knew about the Milky Way the way I know about the Amazon River: a real, significant thing that exists somewhere that is not here.
The Invitation
My college friend Raj has been trying to get me camping for a decade. Every summer: "Daniel, you have to come, it's incredible." Every summer: "I have to work," or "I'm not really a camping person," or my personal favorite, "I don't own any of the right equipment."
Last September, he stopped asking and just booked a site for three nights at a dark sky preserve in rural Utah and told me I was coming. He would provide all equipment. All I had to do was get myself to Salt Lake City airport.
I went because it seemed easier than having the argument again.
The First Night
We set up camp before sunset. I was underwhelmed. I will be honest: it looked like a field. A dry, scrubby, slightly cold field in the middle of nowhere with no coffee shops and no phone signal. Raj was visibly delighted. I was politely skeptical.
We ate dinner around a campfire — actually incredible, I will concede, there is something genuinely superior about food cooked outside — and by 10 PM I was ready for sleep. Raj told me to wait.
"For what?" I said.
"Just — wait," he said. "Fifteen more minutes."
I sat by the dying fire and looked at my boots. Then I looked up.
The Sky
The Milky Way stretched from one horizon to the other. Not a faint smear — a vivid, three-dimensional structure of light, with dense bright cores and dark dust lanes and tendrils of stars extending outward like something alive. It looked like a painting by an artist who had decided that subtlety was overrated. It looked like something that could not possibly be real.
I sat down on the ground. Not gracefully — I just kind of folded. And I started crying. Not from sadness. Not from any particular thought. Just from the sheer volume of the thing: the overwhelming, beautiful, vertiginous reality that this has always been up there and I simply had not been somewhere dark enough to see it.
I sat on the ground in the Utah desert for an hour. Raj sat next to me quietly, which was the exactly right thing to do. The stars wheeled slowly overhead. Satellites crossed. A meteor burned brief and bright. At some point I lay back on the ground and stared straight up and felt the earth rotating under me — that particular sensation of falling upward into the sky that you can only get on a very clear, very dark night far from any city.
What It Did to My Brain
Psychologists have a word for the emotion that large, overwhelming natural experiences produce: awe. It is distinct from other positive emotions. Research on awe — particularly from Berkeley's Dacher Keltner — finds that it reliably produces a specific cognitive shift: the sense of "the small self." Your personal concerns, anxieties, and preoccupations temporarily lose their grip. You feel small in a way that is paradoxically not frightening but relieving. The things you were worried about reveal themselves as genuinely tiny against the actual scale of things.
I had been carrying a very significant amount of anxiety about a career decision I needed to make. I had been turning it over in my mind for months — every angle, every consequence, every possible outcome. Lying in that field looking at our galaxy, the decision did not feel less important. It felt exactly as important as it actually was, which turns out to be considerably less than I had been treating it.
Days Two and Three
I became insufferable on days two and three. I was out of the tent before Raj every morning, watching the sky lighten. I fell asleep the second night mid-sentence while Raj was talking because I was watching stars and simply lost the thread of the conversation. I started asking questions about constellations, about the scale of the galaxy, about what the faint smudge near Andromeda actually was. (A whole other galaxy. Two and a half million light years away. I had been looking at it wrong my entire life.)
I bought a star map app on the drive back to Salt Lake City. I've been to three more dark sky locations since then. I've started planning a trip to see the Southern Hemisphere sky, where you can see the Magellanic Clouds — the Milky Way's satellite galaxies — with the naked eye.
I still live in New York City. I still love it. But I now know something about the ceiling above it that I can't unknow, and that knowledge has permanently and quietly rearranged something in how I move through the world.
— Daniel Kim, New York, NY
Continue Reading
