Venus Morning Star
Find the signal
“All the while the world is turning to noise
Oh, the more that it's surrounding us
From the crest of Mt. Graham in Arizona, the stars are fierce and clear. The dark here is deep enough that the Vatican built their sole observatory outside of Italy on this peak.
My first visit to the mountain came in 2023, when my wolf/dog Maxwell passed away without warning. That night in 2023, my senior dog Daphne and I camped at 7,000 feet as we processed the shock. I had not been back to the mountain since then, but last month after nearly a two year gap Daphne, Jones (my third dog), and I camped here for a night after visiting the Chiricahua Mountains in the southern part of the state. Within two days of our visit, Daphne followed Maxwell across the rainbow bridge.
This afternoon, I make my way up the mountain for a third time with Jones—this time driving all the way to the summit. The drive is a daunting 30 miles of steep switchbacks, the last 12 of which are unpaved and beaten from winter storms. We crest the top where there is a lake with an established campground, but I take a fork before the lake and head off down the last stretch of forest service road instead.
We’ve been on a four-day adventure with too much driving, and the top of Mt Graham is a peaceful respite. To our east the view through the trees opens into a vast distance of desert and mountains we drove through earlier in the day. The stresses of the city seem far away.
For three days, I have fasted from the noise of our culture, dodging the constant outrage that so much media has become, but on the climb up the mountain gorge on some political podcasts.
Jones and I play and explore then I make camp as night falls, foregoing dinner and setting up my hammock between two juniper trees after I secure Jones in the pickup for the night. I sleep soundly but wake intermittently. Each time I do, there is chatter in my head fueled by the podcast I listened to earlier. My attention is being pulled away from my immediate surroundings, the power of the night sky, the gentle sway of trees in the breeze. I am trading direct experience for imaginary arguments over issues I have no control over even here on the top of this remote mountain, in the middle of the night. I am allowing algorithms to win even here.
“Enough,” I say as I shut my eyes and the voices dissipate. It takes an act of will to quell the chatter. I regret listening to those podcasts earlier and letting the culture back in before my four-day detox is over. It dawns on me that this is the state I live in—overstimulated, spun out by arguments over issues removed from my daily life, trying to talk sense into an increasingly dull, partisan, and anti-intellectual void. I think about how much information I consume on a daily basis and am exhausted by it. It’s a wonder I can still hear my own voice at all.
The mountain air is crisp and cool, the hammock gently sways, and I am lulled back to sleep. The milky way above me is wonderful and wide.
Before dawn, a whippoorwill wakes me. These birds were a constant on my family’s farm as a child and are a bridge to my earliest memories. It’s rare that I hear them in the west, but tonight there is one nearby and I am comforted by its familiar call.
Close to dawn, the indigo night turns pre-dawn blue. The moon and Milky Way have both set and now Venus the Morning Star takes center stage. It shimmers so bright it feels like an apparition.
I watch Venus as I fumble through the reverie of waking dreams. The veneer between worlds is thin and I phase between states. I turn in the hammock, drift back to sleep.
Later the call of my bladder forces me to my feet, so I stretch, rise, and let Jones out of the truck. He likewise stretche then settles down under the hammock where we nap a while longer. We linger there, half-dozing, until the sun’s first orange spears pierce the horizon.
We get up again and climb to a rocky outcrop near camp to take in the full glory of the sun’s rise. Venus has faded to a pale white dot. I finally glance at my phone and realize it’s only now 5:45 a.m.
I am grateful for all I have witnessed this morning, grateful for a good night’s sleep under a storm of stars, and grateful that I got to see Venus in all of her pre-dawn glory.
For millennia the night sky was not flooded with light pollution, the call of birds was not drowned by freeway traffic. Venus was revered as a symbol of love and beauty in the ancient world. It became an object of myth and mysticism.
There is so much signal in the world, but the civilization we’ve created separates us from it. I wish I could spend several more days here, but I know we must leave today. Right now, though, we have this moment. I put my phone back in my pocket to block the noise a while longer. I ask Jones if he wants to take a walk.
He happily complies and we wonder out, lost in the signal of creation.