Starred Night

In my gmail inbox there are little stars next to the emails I either hope to read more thoroughly (which rarely happens) or need to respond to (no worries, Rachel, I will get to your rec letter!). But the stars I saw tonight were outside, the twinkly kind that despite how cold or cloudy or light-polluted the night is, are right there. Or not so right there. Some of them are so far away that by the time their light reaches us, they have died out. One I saw tonight was probably not a star at all but a planet with a glow around the outside. The ski trail had me turned around enough I couldn't figure out which direction I was looking, but it seemed too bright and vivid for a star. Ryan reports (sitting next to me with some Internet tool to look up what we can see in the night) that it was likely Jupiter. I was out there to participate in a 3K race for first timers. I watched one race in college (why wasn't I out there? I had been skiing since I was four!) but it was day light and the field quite small. At the 3K race there were only 16 of us, and it was quite dark. Most people race on skates, but a few on classic. After I finished (in12:15, I have no idea what that means, but I was the first classic skier, out of hardly any, to finish) I looped back around at a more graceful pace. At the turn around point the course sends skiers down a long, straight hill that makes enough speed to pole across the soccer fields and over another bump. The stars were competing with suburban light, to be sure, but their steadfast glow grounded me in the tracks. I felt feet over bindings over wood over fancy material around the wood over slick, tracked snow. I slipped underneath them, over the field, and back into the woods.

On my way back I saw the beginning of the 5 and 10K race. The lights from the ice rink back-lit the pack so that they were black stick figures gliding side to side (there were a couple classic racers). As they approached me the swish swish grew louder until they rounded the bend. There must have been at least 60 of them. Just as fast, they were gone, under the stars, to race into the night.