November 18, 2002
leonids
I crawled into bed at nine pm tonight, determined to catch four hours of sleep before my wake up call at 1:30. The Guy's friend R. was going to come by and pick us up in his SUV at 2:00 AM, and drive us up to the mountains so we could watch the Leonid showers, away from city lights.
"We should get a thermos," the Guy said, anticipating that R.'s fiancee would also join us. "We can bring soup."
"Ungh," I said politely, already cataloging in my mind the odds and ends of finger foods I could collect from my refrigerator. For some strange reason, this middle-of-the-night jaunt to the windy hills -- those same hills that Californians persist on calling "mountains," with more ambition than perspective -- was taking on the luster of a mid-day picnic, complete with blankets and sun and beach ball. Except I didn't have a beach ball. My hostessy feelings were attempting to recover from the shock of that realization when the Guy added, "If you don't mind."
Which meant I was to make the soup. Which is why I crawled into bed at 9 PM, well before the bedtime I intend to have even when I'm a 3-foot-5, white-haired irascible gnome woman that has lived longer than anybody intended or even wanted. The Guy, who was busily taking apart a computer in my bedroom, stared at me in surprise. "You're going to bed now?" he demanded, sounding affronted.
"Yes," I said, and firmly closed my eyes. This was a hint. The Guy doesn't do hints. He clattered away on the keyboard for a little while longer, then skulked away, turning off the bedroom lights behind him.
At around 11 pm, having established his independence of my sleep rhythms, he finally crawled into bed.
At around 11:30 pm, he lurched up in bed, uttered, "Damn," and disappeared.
When the alarm finally went off at 1:30 am, it was more an insult than an alert. My internal clock, which is reluctant to remind me about wake-up times for work, had no trouble jogging me out of sleep at exactly 1:28 am. The Guy was still missing, which should have disturbed me more than it did. Groggily caught between resentment at the hour and triumph at having woken up, I pulled on two pairs of pants, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, pulled a pair of socks up to my knees, and found a bandanna to wrap around my head.
The Guy was in the living room, playing Playstation 2. I conjured up what sleepy disgust I could, and stared at him with disapproval. He looked at me, inspected my outfit and, get this, started to grin.
It turned out that he had made a midnight run back to his apartment, where he had an assortment of odds and ends. A thermos, "without a bung," he explained. "But it won't leak if we put saran wrap over it." A pile of sweaters. Hiking boots.
"Stuff we'll need," he informed, hugging me. I glanced up to catch him giving my bandanna an offensive leer. For some reason, the bandanna amused him.
I puttered through the kitchen, gloomily popping finger foods into a bag for snacks. The thermos became the recipient of a pot of tea -- "Are you sure it won't leak?" "It won't leak." -- and I discovered some smoked salmon and water crackers to add to my growing bundle. Our little jaunt up the mountain was about to become a gourmet luncheon. Promptly at 2 AM, the Guy's cell phone rang; R. was waiting outside. His fiancee hadn't come along.
"She has work tomorrow," he said by way of explanation.
Of course, I did too. I just counted this more important.
The ride up the mountain seemed interminable, and reminded me yet again that I am not at my best before noon. My usual early morning sniffles were jolted out of their regular schedule by this unprecedented wake-up call; they humped into overdrive, panicked by the idea that they might have fallen down on the job. In short order, I was snorting and snuffling like an elephant with a head cold.
"Do you need a kleenex, Yuhri?" R. asked, sounding concerned.
I opened my mouth to say yes, please God, yes, give me a kleenex, but my Japanese genes got there before my brain could. "No no," I heard myself saying instead. "I'm fine. It's just early morning sniffles." My Japanese genes suffer from a delusion that they don't want to impose on anyone. My American genes, meanwhile, were hammering on the back of my nasal passages. Shut UP, damn you!
I held my breath for the rest of the trip up. My Japanese genes convinced me that if I didn't sniffle, I wouldn't be disturbing R. In the meantime, I became slowly aware that the thermos in my lap was not only leaking, it was leaking copiously. "Well, we can't have it dripping tea all over R.'s car seats," said my Japanese genes with great disapproval. I meekly cradled the thermos on my lap, where it rapidly soaked through my wool jacket and the two layers of pants underneath.
The car's dashboard display informed us that it was 47 degrees without wind chill, and it was 2:20 AM when we finally reached the spot that would give us the best view. It was a gorgeous place, one I've occasionally visited with the Guy on the back of his motorcycle. All of Silicon Valley is spread out underneath, while nearby trees make some small contribution in the way of blocking the wind.
The moon was phenomenally bright, and lit the entire sky. I had to blink to adjust my eyesight; in many respects, it was brighter than even the headlights on R.'s car, which meant the limited night vision I'd acquired during the ride up was a complete bust out in the reality of it. There were people parked all up and down the road, most of them clustered at a viewing point a little further down the road. We'd passed them without slowing. Both the Guy and R. knew the road better than I did, with their experience riding through these hills. The location they'd selected was less crowded, and quiet because of it. The view was better, being less lit by the city lights below.
The cold air was more bracing than a gallon of coffee; it hit me with a slap, and chased the last thought of sleep away. While we unpacked, I kept half my attention on the sky overhead, hunting for Leo. Orion was easy to identify, and gave me a jumping off point; further over was Ursa Major, and there, underneath, was Regulus. "Leo," I identified uncertainly, and sketched a vague polygon with it as a point.
Sure enough, a few seconds later, a streak flashed out from Leo's foot. The show was obviously going to be spectacular, full moon or no.
We settled down into our chairs. A little ways away, cleverly shaded by a tree, a couple was lolled out on sleeping bags. It was a smart way to watch the show; very shortly, my neck was suffering kinks and my jaw was dropped, simply because it was easier to stare straight up with your mouth gaping wide. The sky doesn't care if you look like a schmuck.
I had imagined that the sky would be full of streaking lights, but it wasn't like that at all. "There's one," one of us would say at first, and the other two would say, "Where? Where?" and turn too late to catch anything but the fading memory of it. Then it would be another person's turn. "Oh!" and the other two would demand, "Where?" After a little while, we caught the rhythm of it, and learned how to look not at a specific location, but let ourselves unfocus and take in the entire night sky.
In the cosmic scheme of things, what we were basically doing was rubbernecking, slowing down to stare at the remains of some cosmic collision tens of thousands of years on the past. All around the galaxy, celestial bodies were grumbling to themselves about the bottleneck around Earth. "Goddammit, woman," they were yelling out their windows. "Just fucking drive already."
But oh, what an accident. And oh, what gorgeous debris. About once every ten seconds, the sky would light up with a white flare, and with every single one my heart would leap. My mind, which has already established itself as low on the totem pole of intellectual mightiness, had arrived at a suitable mantra which it repeated with every single new meteor. "There's another one!"
Halfway through our Leonid viewing, a sudden, soundless explosion in the sky burned one of Leo's corners. A brilliant green-white flash of light puffed out in a glorious display of stellar violence. Whether two meteors had exploded in mid-air, or the meteor was headed directly for us and so had given us a unique viewing angle, we were unsure. Perhaps this morning all Cingular Wireless cell phones would be out of commission due to Act of God. We didn't care. It was spectacular.
We talked excitedly about it for the next half hour, while meteor after meteor jerked us this way and that with open mouths and delight. From time to time I would start to clock the number of meteors seen per minute, only to lose track of my second hand count when the next bright streak lit up the sky. All told we must have seen a hundred, or maybe more; a lifetime's worth of shooting stars, packed into one gorgeous night.
I rested my head on the Guy's shoulder. "We have to come up here some night when the moon isn't full," I said. My astronomical passions were being revived anew; I was already planning once more how long it would take me to buy myself a telescope.
Around 3:30 AM, when both meteors and viewers found themselves at low ebb, packed ourselves up and ducked into the car.
I dozed on the way home, the exhilerating effect of cold air not proof against the SUV's heater at full blast. We tumbled out of the car in front of the neighboring apartment, bid good-bye to R., and bundled ourselves up to bed. The second I walked into my warm bedroom, I was abruptly wracked with shivers. I changed my clothes hastily, and fussed the Guy into bed so that he could provide me with the body heat I so desperately needed.
"Wasn't that nice?" I said through chattering teeth.
"Very nice," he agreed. His lack of interest in astronomy aside, there was very little one could object to when treated to a display like tonight.
"Thanks for coming with me," I mumbled. His body heat was already pitchforking me back to sleep.
He poked his cold nose in my neck. "I'd do anything for you," I think I heard him say.
I fell asleep to him holding conversation with the back of my ear and dreamed about stars.