The Year Without a Sky

Meteor watching is the best part of August.

Even August 2020. One night of humanity's most-hated year found me stretched out in the backyard at around 3:30 in the morning looking up. It was dark enough or had to be. A light-polluting orange streetlight stands directly across from my house, ruling out my front yard as the kind of place where you’d sprawl on your back to watch for meteors.

(Once I lived in a neighborhood where you could count on the neighbors to keep the streetlights shot out. But that was long ago, in another time and place, with its own special challenges.)

The first few meteors were weak. Anemic. Then it came — one of those explosive fireballs that skid across the sky trailing Van Gogh streaks of light. The kind of meteor that hisses loud enough for you to hear it.

Then I heard something else. Coughing.

And not even in my neighborhood. It came from a house in the bigger, slightly wealthier neighborhood behind ours. There were fences between us. Not to mention the electric company’s easement complete with drainage ditch.

It isn’t like houses in Louisiana are silent in August. There’s forever a soft hum all around us from the low song of our air conditioners.

Whoever coughed was coughing hard.

Their light came on.

I had no more heart to watch the skies for meteors, and so I went inside.

And yet. As awful as 2020 was, how much more awful would it have been if it was a year without a sky?

A year like this one. Endless, relentless rain. The other day we got almost eight inches, and the neighbors across the street lost a vehicle to street flooding. They still have three others. Now the driver who gets home last parks on the front lawn to get at least a few inches higher.

In 2020, I walked at night, often very late. There were no people after dark. No vehicles in the street, though we could rely on it to be a street rather than a river. Just trees, houses, sky. I observed a number of satellites, some of them tracking along in each other’s wake like a string of ducklings. When did they start doing that?

The planets put on a good show that culminated in the so-called Christmas star conjunction. Evening by evening, Jupiter and Saturn danced closer together. Around the time of the winter solstice, they began to dance farther apart again.

What makes one year rainier than the others? What makes one place rainier? Somebody knows, but I don’t. The Drought Monitor says it doesn’t rain anymore on the western side of the continent. Their sky is stolen by endless fire and smoke.

But, in 2020, if we had nothing else, we had the stars. In my neighborhood, to walk at three in the morning is to walk unseen.

I rarely encountered anyone else, not even to spot them flying overhead. A plane an hour maybe. Odd to see more satellites an hour than commercial aircraft, but for a time I did. I learned all the dark spots where you could stand and see some bit of sky without getting your night vision burned out by the streetlight.

The comet Neowise chose to reach peak brightness at an interesting time and place — low on the horizon setting in the west not so long after sunset. I scouted for a gap through houses and trees to see the needed portion of the sky.

The best place was a dark curve in the middle of the street. From here, I could look beyond the right side of a dark house to the horizon. You had to pick your spot carefully, or the trees on either side would block your view of the lower sky.

The house was dark because the man who lived there had died, but I didn’t know it then. I didn’t find out until someone came and threw all his things onto the front lawn— a pile of things so high I struggled to believe he’d ever fit them all inside.

All I knew then was I’d found a good line of sight. Standing in the middle of a street to stargaze is not, of course, ideal. But it was 2020, and no one had anywhere to go, and so there was no traffic. I lifted my binoculars. The comet leaped into view in front of me.

I ran back to my house to grab my husband. “Hurry! Before it sets.”

At first, he looked too high. I did too for a minute. It was setting, the world was turning, nothing ever stops.

“It’s lower than you think,” I said. “Bigger too.”

“Oh!” he said. “It has two tails.”

It did. The blue tail looked brighter than we thought it would.

A short time ago, I read A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan. Published in 1999, it’s a short novel set not long after the Civil War. A preacher/undertaker/sheriff must somehow save a small town first hit by a contagious plague (diphtheria) and then menaced by wildfire. It works out about as well as you’d expect.

This is what I feared for Louisiana, only with a hurricane in place of the fire. Anybody can handle anything if it happens one bad thing at a time. But when it’s everything at once?

Please, no hurricanes this year.

Of course, I say the same prayer every year. They work about as well as thoughts and prayers usually do.

So. Hurricane Ida. Late August. The Delta pandemic in full swing, every hospital full. We couldn't risk evacuating, and anywhere there was nowhere safe to go.

Fortunately, we lost nothing worse than a couple of weeks. The electric lines were down, the water had to be drunk from bottles, and so we couldn't work. Hardly the most terrible outcome.

Meanwhile, out west, the plot of O'Nan's novel replayed over and over again. Plague and fire together.

And yet the skies are never gone forever.

More and more often now, we see a break in the relentless clouds. After a sunset not so many weeks ago, I saw a single bright star low on the western horizon.

For a moment, I stood slack-jawed. A plane, I thought, but it wasn’t. Not a star either.

It was the familiar planet Venus and shouldn’t have been astonishing at all.

Why did it seem as if I hadn’t seen her in so long?

The terrible weather, I thought. But it was more. Venus can pierce the clouds, at least when they’re thin enough. She was piercing them even as I gazed up in wonder.

Her absence hadn't been all clouds and my gloomy imagination, though. Space.com explains she went behind the sun on March 26 and vanished from all human view for weeks to emerge slowly and shyly in May. Even then, she traveled close behind the sun, setting during twilight, so she didn’t have dark sky behind her.

But now our so-called evening star is coming back to us. Night by night, and bit by bit. By December, Venus will be at her brightest — bright enough to be 2021’s Christmas star.

The year without a sky will be over.

Photo Credits

Feature Photo: Comet Neowise from Caliente, California by Jason Hullinger (amewzing) via CC-by-2.0 license.

The other three photographs were taken by the author from my home in southeast Louisiana in the summer of 2021.

Author's Note

A pre-Hurricane Ida version of this story was published in Be Yourself, a publication hosted on Medium. I have updated the photographs as well as several paragraphs of the text.

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