On a deep winter night in the Montana backcountry, Susan Marsh encounters infinity. (from her Pushcart Prize-nominated essay “Kin to the Stars,” in the current issue of Deep Wild Journal.)
Long after midnight I woke and slowly became conscious of what had roused me: I had to pee. I lay still for most of an hour, torn between the warmth of my sleeping bag and the inevitability that I would have to leave it. This was the bane of camping, inconvenient enough in summer when one could scurry out of the tent and return while the bedroll was still warm. In winter, a night visit to the privy required suiting up as if for an expedition.
Resigned, I pulled on my down booties, parka, and heavy wool hat and slinked toward the door, my footfalls as light as I could make them. The floor boards answered, and in the stillness they cracked. Loudly. If I woke anyone, they didn’t let me know.
As I closed the door behind me and stepped off the cabin’s porch, I checked the thermometer hanging there. I wished I hadn’t—in the faint starlight I could read it well enough: thirty below. I hurried to the outhouse.
On the way back, I paused, drawn by the mountains and sky. Massive volcanic cliffs stood on the far wall of the glacier-carved canyon, their chiseled facets washed in a thin spray of starlight. The Milky Way stretched overhead in a broad curve, bright enough to cast shadows. Far from the lights of town, eight thousand feet above sea level in the middle of a moonless winter night, the sky was as dense as a blizzard.
With the night came silence. It was not the close silence of a cave, where sounds are instantly absorbed by a bunker of solid rock. Instead of the absorption of sound, I experienced its absence. No breath of wind to stir the spruces, no gurgle of water in the creek, no noise from me as long as I held still.
The universe drew close, the ultimate wilderness an arm’s reach away. A weak diurnal creature yearning to surrender to this moment of enchantment, I lingered as long as I could, defying the penetrating cold. How many nights like this had I missed, trading a glimpse of the sublime for the comfort of my bed? Without the tea with brandy, I probably would have missed this one.
Again I thought of the moose we had seen that afternoon, resting somewhere under the cliffs and stars. She belonged, along with roosting chickadees, hibernating marmots, and the bare, dormant willows, to a fundamental existence from which I had insulated myself.
A sense of deep kinship washed over me like starlight—kinship with the moose, the cliffs, the stars. At the same time I felt small and insignificant, in that good way that comes when you witness the night sky and realize your great luck at being alive and conscious of it. Delicious as the feeling was, I was becoming seriously chilled. With a final glance skyward, I shuffled toward the cabin door.
To read Susan’s essay in full, as well as the work of 51 other writers inspired by their backcountry journeys, order a copy of Deep Wild 2023. The 2024 issue, our sixth, is currently in the works!
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