Rain dripped from the eaves of our cabin porch near Westcliffe, Colorado, as Led Zeppelin’s The Rain Song played in my earbuds. A bluebird fluttered onto the porch rail. It was sixty degrees, and the sky was electric as I gazed at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising like blue steel in the distance. I tuned my playlist to match the view—Vince Gill, James Taylor’s Country Road, the Allman Brothers’ Blue Sky.
The mountains whispered as I wrote. My gaze wandered again to the Southern Rockies. What makes us want to climb them—to stand where the air thins and look down on the valleys where we ordinarily live and breathe?
We chose a closer and safer hike.
Karen and I climbed the hill beside our cabin. We dodged outcrops of granite, jackrabbit droppings, and cactus on our way to the top. Across the valley, Cottonwood Peak rose from the Sangre de Cristo range.
The view from the top was breathtaking. The din of our other world—texts and emails, work and busyness—had gone silent. In its place, a zephyr moved through the aspens and pines. We stood like conquerors and slowly turned in every direction, taking in the view.
Karen called my mom from the peak because it was the only place she could catch a strong cell signal. They caught up on cats, gardens, rain levels, and the everyday care of the household we had left behind in Oklahoma.
We descended and drove to Royal Gorge. Standing on the suspension bridge, we looked down at what seemed like toy boats: kayakers nine hundred feet below, navigating the rapids of the Arkansas River at the bottom of the gorge. Karen and our daughter Jenna rode the zip line, reminding me of Where Eagles Dare, with Richard Burton riding atop a cable car high in the Alps.
Later, driving through San Isabel National Forest, we rounded a sharp curve and Karen pointed toward a ledge above the highway.
“Bear!”
We stared at a large black bear, who returned our stares before trotting away.
A little farther on, we spotted another bear in a valley of spruce and meadow grass. This one was two-toned—chocolate brown with a necklace of butterscotch. It wasn’t foraging for blackberries. It was tearing meat from a fresh kill.
That evening, as dusk faded to black, we looked up and found the Milky Way.
Then, low in the northwestern sky, there it was: Comet NEOWISE.
Astronomers tell us that it will return in approximately 6,800 years.
Against that remarkable black sky, we could easily see the comet and its long tail. The ancients looked at the stars and named what they saw. Ursa Major: the Great Bear, containing the familiar stars of the Big Dipper.
In 1690, the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Hevelius published a star atlas. Tucked into one of his celestial charts is a small cherub beside a Latin motto whose meaning is wonderfully simple:
The naked eye is best.
Most days we move too quickly to notice much of anything. We chase appointments, messages, errands, obligations—the small gravity of ordinary life. We look without really seeing.
But on this day, we saw two bears in the Colorado wilderness, a comet crossing the night sky, and the Great Bear shining above us as it has for generations beyond counting.
None of it had been arranged for us. Creation was simply going about its ancient business, whether anyone happened to be watching or not.
We happened to be watching.
Perhaps Hevelius was right.
The naked eye is best.
