Diving Into the Night Sky

Comet Neowise should be visible tonight. The binoculars had been sitting on my kitchen table for three days. The first night it was too cloudy. The second night it rained, and finally tonight, I should be able to find the comet’s tail.

The telescope was still at Dad’s house. He would have been so happy to find the comet, with me. Every time I see the news about the comet, or the stars, or the ocean, I long to hear Dad’s voice.

As a young man, Dad was in the Navy. He, occasionally, shared his tales of adventure and misadventure, with his family and friends. His scary, near misses with catastrophe, on the aircraft carrier, amazed us all. Every story was a reminder, to us, of how lucky we were that he had survived. And, but for the stars, perhaps we, his children, would not be here at all.

Once, Dad had gone overboard, off of the deck of the aircraft carrier, he had been assigned to. He survived the fall to the water, only to discover the terror of being in an ocean, alone. Unless a man going overboard was witnessed, it could be hours before a sailor was missed. He prayed that someone had seen him go over. He began shouting and waving his arms, as the ship moved forward, without him.

After Dad was certain that he could no longer be seen, or heard, by his shipmates, he did his best to tie up and inflate his pants to help keep him afloat. He knew a couple of things, he said, about his situation. One was that a search, for him, would be limited, and the other was that if he was afraid, his heart rate would climb and he would attract the animals in the water that he feared the most. Fear, he was told, was a magnet for sharks.

As it grew darker, the calm dark blue of the sky seemed friendlier than incessant gray waves. As the stars became brighter, he tried to focus on the arrangement of the constellations, in between the bobbing of the waves. The sky was busy with patterns he recognized from his childhood.

If the North Star is that one, was that Virgo, he asked himself? He tried to name all of the animal constellations, the Ursa Minor and Major, Pegasus, Leo the lion, Canis Major, and Scorpio. He knew there were many others and he tried to remember their names and find them, above. Where was Gemini? What was the Greek story about Cassiopeia? Was that the Scales or Libra?

He thought about the night that he and his brother had snuck out of the house when they were kids. Longing to be outside, on the warm summer night, they craved the open, unsupervised space of a nearby field. Avoiding detection, by lying on their backs, they marveled at the vastness of the sky, and the countless stars. Feeling small, together, against the dark blue starscape above the field, they vowed to learn to navigate by those stars.

Later, as they snuck back inside the house, through the open window, bumping knees and elbows, they giggled. They crawled into their beds and fell instantly asleep. The next day, they agreed to start saving their chore money for a cheap telescope. They used library books and an old broken globe, as the basis for the constellation map, they made, of their night sky.

In the ocean, wave by wave, the light appeared, first, as just a change in the deepness of the blue above the water. From a distance, the light and then, the sun, seemed to climb slowly, higher, into the daytime sky. Thirst, exposure, cold, and fear began to eat away at Dad’s resolve. Was that a fin he saw? No, he told himself, it was just a shadow, or maybe a fish.

As the afternoon lengthened, and still no ships appeared on the horizon, he tried to plan the upcoming night’s stargazing. What constellations had he missed, from their old star map project? Dad wondered, did his brother still have the telescope? What was that noise?

He looked up to see a helicopter. Dad was sure that they were looking for him. He tried to wave his arms and shout and was relieved and elated, to see the copter nose turn and point in his direction.

As Dad crawled across the deck of the helicopter, and the crew stored the gear used to pluck him from the waves, he heard the pilot say, "what a lucky sailor he was." The pilot shouted over the engine noise, “There are at least three sharks within ten miles of where we picked you up!” The pilot continued, “If you had been afraid, the sharks would have sensed your fear.” Dad said nothing as he gulped down the water he had been handed.

The next Thanksgiving that Dad was home, he and his brother sat in the living room, drinking beer and watching the football game. During a game break, and well after the Star-Spangled Banner had been sung, Dad turned to his brother and asked, “Do you still have our old telescope?” “No,” replied his brother, “why?”

Dad told, for the first time, the story of his night in the ocean. He explained to his brother, how their night in the field, looking at the stars in the sky, so many years ago, had saved him from the sharks.