Personal Essay

Starshine

            The morning rushed up like a steam locomotive, as the sun disk peeked over the Wasatch Mountains.  Golden sunlight rushed across the valley floor, chasing the mountain-shadow eastward at a thousand miles an hour.  A large, dark-haired man gathers up the hand of a young boy and walks him over to a battered old pickup truck.  After opening the dented, scratched door, the man bends down and engulfs the boy’s torso in his work-roughened hands, “Up you go, move on over.” he mock growls at the eager child.  The boy just smiles as he slides across the brown naughahyde, wincing slightly at the chill of the seat, “Where’re we going Uncle Arnie?”

            This day was preceded with a night that has been repeated countless times, but not, I must say, with the same eyes, ears, and brain as then.  I had been given the opportunity to spend a week with Uncle and Aunt, and jumped on it just as, well, just as a duck jumps on a Junebug.  My father was 10,000 miles away easing his divorce pains on a Navy destroyer in the western Pacific Ocean.  I lived with my Mother and little sister and had the man-hunger that all little boys have after a long sentence of exclusive female association.  Trucks, tractors, barns, machinery, irrigation ditches, hedges like castle walls, quail, and pheasants, all have greater attraction than a mother’s tender hugs and caresses.  Scraped knees, frogs, dogs, and bloody scabs, almost always, have more power to attract young male attention than dresses, sweet-smelling hair or soapy baths do.  And Uncle had all those things at his finger tips; he ran Grampa’s orchard.  I don’t remember Grampa being around much in those days, he must have been there, but the vivid memories of time with my mother’s older brother linger until today.  We played tag and catch with Babe, a velvet eared German Shorthaired Pointer bitch (there’s no greater sop for a child’s tears than the floppy soft ears of a dog- - others have verified my long standing belief), waiting for the day to pass.  “Do you want to go irrigating tonight?”  We get our turn at eleven.” Uncle breathes those magic words.  Words that no sane boy could ever turn down.  “What about my bedtime?”  I wonder aloud.  “I’ll wake you up when it’s time to go.” he answers.  Hurray, Hurray!  After supper, the pre-daylight savings time day came to its natural end.  My head sinks down, I wonder if sleep would ever come.  Of course it does, as after every typical kid day.  I was afflicted with that inexorable gravitational pull on fatigued eyelids.  As soon as I fell asleep it seemed like Uncle was shaking my shoulder to get up.  “Better take your jacket, it’ll be chilly on the ditch bank”, Uncle gently guides my sleep numb arms into a lender jacket (a loaned heavy shirt of Uncle’s).  We go out of the house, into a pool of porch light that barely holds the dark at bay.  Uncle lifts me into the truck shooing me over so that he has room to slide in behind the wheel.  We drive a short distance to the orchard, past the farmhouse, the ruby trunks of the cherry tree; driving on down by the barn, rolling past row after soldier row of MacIntosh, the Red Delicious and finally making a left turn down between the ordered ranks of the Roman Beauties.  The incandescent yellow light thrown by the pie dish headlights, bores through the thick darkness of these fruitwoods.  Startled, small birds flutter barely out of the path of the truck.  Suddenly, a right leg stabs at the brake pedal, “Whoa! don’t want to get us stuck in the mud.” Uncle reaches out and turns off the headlights.  Immediately the dark gathers around us like my coat, head to toe, wrapped tight around our chests’ tight enough to make breathing a burden, all of a sudden.  He turns the truck engine off and the silence adds its’ load to the darkness.  Suddenly apprehensive, I slide closer to the warmth of Uncle’s large frame, but in vain, as he steps out of the truck and gathers up his shovel and my hand.  “Come on boy, we don’t want the neighbors to take our water.”  And we’re off, gliding through that black velvet darkness, serenaded by the back scratch/fiddle playing insect residents of the orchard.  Five year old legs pump furiously to keep my toes from dragging furrows in the dirt.  Uncle saunters unconcerned (that my legs will surely be worn off right up to my knees) through unseen thickets snagging at my Levi’s, flashing his light here and there, unerringly moving to some pre-determined coordinate in that grid of living applesauce.  Although I now know the magician’s trick of finding your way across a familiar tract of acreage, it was a mystery to me then.  I was wondering what would become of me if somehow my hand became separated from the giant warmth of Uncle’s grip.  Would I wander endlessly through mega-acres (just 40) of Grampa’s kingdom, what would I eat (especially eat!), did anyone even love me anymore (where was my daddy?).  When, of a suddenness, my mind’s perambulations were brought up, just as short as those five year old legs, at the edge of a wet smelling, gurgling dark void.  The warm golden beam of the flashlight struck leaden jewels on the surface of the ditch that had looked so inviting in the daylight.  Now, the shining just seemed to be some malevolent invitation to stay away.  “I’m going over there, and it’s real muddy.  Why don’t you stay right here and I’ll be back in a minute.  OK?” Uncle asks me.  My head does a fair imitation of one those rear car window dogs, describing a side to side, up and down wag/nod, as I stammer out  my nervous agreement, “OK”.  The darkness gathers in around me as that warm spot of light moves off, up the flow of waterway.  I long to be with that small glow of security instead of standing by myself in the night, not knowing where my next meal is coming from.  Restlessly, I shuffle my feet in a small dance of childish fear of things unknown.  The serenade that seemed so great just moments ago, now seemed dirge-like as the reality of my aloneness washes over my slight frame.  I glance around as if I could see the cause of my discomfort through the inky blackness.  For some reason, I glanced up.  “Oh, My GOD!” my childish brain screamed, “Look at all them diamonds in the sky!” The clear night air of Utah Valley magnified the dome of stars that shone so intensely in the absence of Sister Moon.  They put the crystal brilliance of gems to shame that night.  My uneasiness faded away beneath the warmth of icy bright stars, millions of eons away.  The dance of fear turns instead to the primal beat of a dance-step known to every human being born on this planet, if only in the genetic code of their chromosomes.  Head back, mouth opens wide, or even slightly, hands at your sides, left foot steps sideways and right slides to meet the left in a twirl of bewitched circle.  Around and around, counter clockwise, Orion, Pleides, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, North Star..........Orion, Pleides, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, North Star, on and on until you think you may fall down full length on your back, star-struck and mute.  I revel in the wash of starlight that night.  Never before and certainly not since have “i” felt so small.

            My reverie is shattered as the suck and splash of size 12 gum boots intrude,  “Ready for home?” and my slack right arm jerks fishing-line taut as the missing warmth of Uncle Arnie’s big rough hand gathers mine up and heads for that old, battered pickup and home.  My interrupted sleep is quickly resumed as I am tucked into my spare bed nest.  My dreams change from frolicsome dogs and thrown balls to the cold, distant shimmer of stars.  I am changed, and I know that I am.  I will see hundreds of awesome night skies in the years that follow but never again with those five-year-old eyes. 

Michael D. LeFevre ã Copyright  24 April 1995