PRELUDE NOTES
The night I saw Jupiter cry
By Annelies Pool
It was one of those cold January nights when the stars were tossed against the midnight blue like diamonds. Well below minus thirty, the air was clear. Bill and I drove to the airport to pick up his sister and her husband who had come to visit. Vancouverites, unused to the northern cold, our guests wore borrowed ski jackets and boots. The short walk across the tarmac from the plane to the terminal building made them shiver. We wasted no time in bundling them and their luggage into our truck, then set off on the half-hour drive to the cabin, our home at Prelude Lake.
Halfway home, Bill veered off the highway into the parking lot in front a frozen lake, stopped the car and insisted we all get out.
“You have to see this!” he said pointing to the sky. “The Hale Bop!”
We scrambled out of the truck and huddling against the cold with our hands in our pockets, looking up. The Hale Bop comet streaked against the velvet sky, its tail fanning out behind it. The night was so silent, we could almost hear the comet swish. Everything dropped away and we were catapulted into that timeless state where all that exists is the universe in all its immensity.
A breeze rattled the birch trees and broke the spell. We realized we were freezing our butts off. Laughing, we piled back into the truck and as it sped down the highway, we agreed that Bill was crazy. Who but a crazy man would make his guests get out of a warm truck in the bitter cold to look at the sky? Yet all these years later, that moment watching the Hale Bop is what I remember about that visit.
Bill has been an aficionado of the winter sky ever since we moved to Prelude Lake 20 years ago. It’s hard not to be out here. We are away from the city lights and on the long winter nights the dark wraps itself around you like a shroud. Unless you learn to see the light, blackness will settle into your soul. Bill has learned to identify the constellations and the planets and he knows the phases of the moon. He watches the sky through a huge pair of astronomical binoculars. This always makes me laugh because when he raises them to his eyes, he looks like a bug-eyed cartoon character.
We go walking under the full moon when the trees cast long shadows in the snow. Or a quarter moon when the cold bites my teeth and the sky is alive with stars. Bill will point to the brightest star and tell me it’s Venus and even though it looks like all the other stars, there’s something magical in knowing that particular one is a planet. If we’re lucky, the Northern Lights will sweep across the sky and make us completely unmindful of the cold and dark.
I am always moved by the winter sky, but never more so than the night last year when I saw Jupiter.
I was already in my pyjamas, feet up, reading before bed when Bill went out to walk the dog. He returned, raced across the living room to get his binoculars, then was gone again.
Seconds later, he was back. “Come and see Jupiter’s moons!” he said.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes!”
I pulled my parka over my robe, jammed a fleece hat on my head, shoved my feet into a pair of Sorels and, feeling like an escapee from a dementia centre, went out. When I looked through the binoculars, I saw Jupiter with four moons trailing it like tears. I looked at the sky, then back at Jupiter, then back at the sky and it suddenly seemed like the whole sky was filled with Jupiter’s tears.
I have never been able to see the sky the same way since.
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