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                                                         Coming Home

       Driving home tonight after the sun had gone down I was mesmerized by the darkness of the open countryside. Vast empty pastures with only the occasional light winking from farmhouse windows and distant cabins across the blackness. Peyton and I met this afternoon in Blairsville to go see the movie, “Robocop” and have our evening meal. The movie was quite entertaining and dinner at Dan’s Cuban Grill was excellent as usual. The thing was the drive home from Blairsville by way of Skeenah Gap Road. It must be at least forty five or more miles to our house from Blairsville and I only passed a handful of cars which seems unlikely. Hard to believe that so little traffic is even possible in this day and age but we are way out in the country in the hinterlands of Gilmer and Fannin County. The night was so dark and the stars so brilliant and perfectly arranged in the firmament I could hardly keep my eyes on the road. I managed to steal only quick glances up at the immense black sky and blinking stars above me. Cassiopeia, Vela, Gemini, Orion and even Betelgeuse were up there beyond heaven doing what they have done for thousands of years before I was born and likely before there was an earth to look up from. The illusion of wonder was overwhelming for me in my little car zooming along the dark country side on a cold February night, all alone with no sounds but those coming from the car and the pavement. It all most made me dizzy.

      Coming around curves my head lights illuminated the fields and pastures sweeping out into the impenetrable obscurity revealing the occasional deer looking like frozen sculptures with glowing silver eyes.  The interior of the abutting woods beyond the asphalt awoke with the brilliant lights from my vehicle as I drove down Black Ankle creek Road to the t-bone intersection of Big Creek Road. I turned left, drove a quarter of a mile and crossed the bridge over the creek by the church and the cemetery above on the hill. Just beyond Big Creek Baptist Church I stopped and stepped out of the car into the night to observe more fully the expansive sky and the vast innumerable stars. A small ghostly opossum secreted in the dry grass within a few feet of me panicked and skittered away down the bank toward the creek rattling the dormant weeds and making certain his escape down the hill into the anonymity of the night with his naked tail hysterically spinning circles in the air behind him.

We moved here nine years ago from our home of thirty years in Clayton County which was just south of Atlanta not so far from 285 and the Atlanta airport. The night sky here, without all the ambient light of Atlanta and the urban sprawl still fascinates me and I can gaze at it for hours. All those years living in the urban environment the night sky was lost to me except for weekends at Big Creek.

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