The Cold at Sundown

'There it is,' my sister said, and I knew what she meant without turning around. The sun had gone behind the ridge while we were cooking, and the desert gave back its heat all at once. The air at my ankles turned cold while the air at my cheeks was still warm, and then the warm was gone. My breath showed in front of my face.

We had come up that afternoon over a pass and down a long valley of sage and juniper into the basin. That country keeps to itself. The road climbs, the trees fall away, and then you are simply in it — a floor of pale earth, mountains standing at a distance on every side, not one light anywhere. Along the way the light had gone from gold to copper to grey. We turned off the road at a flat place with a single old juniper and had the tent up before the wind changed.

My sister has camped here every October for years. She tramps the ground flat with her boots before the tent goes up, a habit from all that time, and she had told me to bring the jacket that ends at the chin. I wore it open through the afternoon. Now I zipped it to the top, turned the collar up, and put my hands in the pockets. She was still wearing hers open. 'You'll learn,' she said, and went back to the stove.

The stove flame had burned with a yellow head in the afternoon. Now it ran low and blue, and the water for the coffee took a long time. A jet passed over, high and far to the south, and for a minute its trail caught the last sunlight while the ground was already dark. Then the trail faded and the sky turned the colour of old denim.

Sunset

The first stars came out one at a time. I had never watched a sky populate itself before; from where I live they all arrive at once, outshone. Here the brightest came first, low in the east, then the rest filled in behind them, until the dark between the bright ones was only more stars.

The wind, which had moved through the sage all day, quit. The silence that came down with it ran deep, a well you could stand at the top of, and the fire made the only noise — a soft even burning of juniper wood that threw sparks the size of rice into the dark.

We ate standing up — beans from the pot, bread torn in half — and the cold by then was a solid thing.

It came up through the soles of my boots and found the gaps where the jacket had not quite sealed. My sister poured the coffee and we held the cups with both hands. Around us the basin had gone dark down to its bones; the mountains were black shapes without depth, and the sky stood over them like a lid lifted off a jar.

I had a map of the constellations on my wall as a kid, and it was all up there — the long sprawl of Orion, the Pleiades like a thumbprint of light, the Dipper crawling up the north side of the dark. But the map had not prepared me for the light itself, or for the Milky Way, which ran the whole width of the sky, a band of faint dust across a road of stars above a road of earth.

The crossing

I told my sister I was going to walk out a little way. 'Watch for the cold,' she said. I laughed, but she was right to say it. Ten steps from the fire the warmth was gone, and the dark had a temperature you could feel on the face like a hand laid flat.

I stood past the juniper with my jacket zipped to the chin and looked up. That was when I saw the satellite — a point of steady light, no blinking, moving across the whole field of stars. It did not hurry. It seemed to take its time on purpose, and I watched it pass the Dipper's handle, cross the black space beyond it, and go on until it sank behind the ridge to the east.

The ground at my feet was faintly silver with starlight, and there was no moon. The only shadow was the long one the fire threw ahead of me. I stamped my boots, and the sound went out a little way and stopped, swallowed by the open country. The satellite kept its pace — the one moving thing in a sky of fixed ones.

The night went on. I thought about the satellite — how it carried someone's voice or someone's picture of the ground, or just its own machinery, and how the people who put it up there had never seen it the way I was seeing it, from a dark basin with no one awake anywhere around. Then I walked back to the fire.

We banked the fire and crawled into the tent. I lay in my bag a long time, and when I finally turned my face out of the hood, the tent walls were glowing — the sky still there, brighter than the moonless ground. It had not thinned at all. There was frost on the zipper by the time I stopped looking.