Standing Still at the Edge of the Universe Beneath the Arizona Sky

Northern Arizona, Pandemic Year

I had crossed into Arizona from Utah sometime late in the day and found myself heading toward the road that leads to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The North Rim was closed because of the pandemic, which meant there was almost nobody out there.

Earlier, I had stopped for gas at a small station somewhere along the way, but something was happening inside. An argument about masks. One person wearing one. Another refusing. Then suddenly guns were out.

I remember not even fully processing it. I just left.

Somewhere after that I made a wrong turn.

At first I didn’t realize it. I was driving through open desert while the landscape slowly began giving way toward the Kaibab Plateau, and by the time I understood I was going the wrong direction, I also realized I didn’t have much gas left.

So I pulled over.

The darkness out there did not feel normal. It felt absolute.

When I turned off the car and the headlights disappeared, I couldn’t see anything beyond the windows. No horizon. No shape to the land. Nothing. I didn’t even want to let my dogs out because I had no idea what surrounded us. The thought of animals somewhere out there in the dark felt suddenly very real.

So I stayed inside the car and eventually fell asleep.

I woke sometime around three in the morning thinking someone had turned on lights.

The desert outside the car was glowing.

For a moment I thought of Walmart parking lots at night, that strange artificial brightness that makes everything feel awake even when nobody is there.

But there was no store. No town. No traffic.

Just the road shining pale beneath me like crushed crystal.

I opened the car door slowly and stepped outside.

The late summer air was dry and crisp, almost absent, as if the darkness had stripped the world down to only stone, sky, and silence.

My dogs climbed out and stayed close beside me. They were used to the road by then. Used to unfamiliar places in the dark.

I stood there trying to understand where the brightness was coming from.

At first I looked toward the horizon and saw what seemed like a dense river of stars stretched across the edge of the sky.

Then I looked higher.

And higher.

My neck almost bent backward trying to follow it.

The Milky Way did not feel distant. It felt consuming. Endless. So large that for a moment I almost felt physically detached from the earth, as if one jump might lift me off the desert floor and pull me upward into whatever this thing really was.

I had never seen anything remotely like it before. Not in photographs. Not in books. Not online.

And the strangest part was realizing that even this impossible sky above me was still only a fraction of what actually existed.

I wasn’t standing beneath it.

I was already inside it.

There I was, somewhere in northern Arizona during the strangest year any of us could remember, low on gas, turned around in the middle of nowhere, standing beside my car while my dogs waited quietly near the roadside, feeling both microscopic and infinite at the same time.

I remember realizing that what frightened me was not the desert.

It was the sudden awareness of how vast everything really was.

And standing there beneath all of it, the fight at the gas station suddenly felt impossibly small. Two frightened human beings pointing guns at each other over masks on a tiny stretch of road somewhere on the crust of a planet floating through a universe so large neither of them, nor I, could truly comprehend it.