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September 27, 2018
Mike McAdoo
San Francisco
Recently, I was in a remote native village on the southwest shore of the Norton Sound in Western Alaska. One evening, a local native, Joseph, who had befriended me, took me for a late drive about six miles outside the village to a hill overlooking the hamlet and the valley. I could see a canal which drained into the Yukon River well south of where we stood, as well as a vast mountain range to the east. There were flocks of crane and geese migrating in “V” formations above. As we stood on the edge of the dirt road path, Joe started to point out the different star formations. He mentioned that he would bring his son out to this site and view the heavens above, sometimes bringing sleeping bags and just sitting in the back of his pickup until well past midnight. It brought me back more than a half century with my father. Dad would bring me to our backyard on the Peninsula in the evening and we would sit on folding chairs and gaze at the night sky. To me, the nighttime sky was a labyrinth of luminous objects. Dad, who had been in the Navy, knew the nighttime sky. He would put his hand on my shoulder and tell me about the different stellar bodies, pointing out the planets and stars amidst the cosmos. I was transfixed as I looked upward. Those evenings spent with dad are among the fondest of my memories of my youth.
On a vast landscape, well into the northern latitudes of the last frontier, near the end of my seventh decade, I was transported back in time. With moist eyes, I could hear my father’s reassuring voice and feel the touch of his hand on my shoulder, guiding me through the night sky, shedding light where there was darkness and warmth where there was a cold chill. Six decades later, on a starry night on a tundra plain, I was 8-years-old again with my father at my side.
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