A Night Under the Stars
By Terry Davis
I remember the moment I became conscious of myself in the Cosmos. Yes, I know the word is elevated beyond my low-rent scribblings and belongs to Carl Sagan, anyway, bless his soul. But that’s the word I want because it means the whole cosmic system of matter and energy, which is precisely what I mean, rather than “in the world.” Back then, in the Fifties, we didn’t know the fantastic extent of the cosmos. I learned that the Milky Way was the universe, and that’s what I was gazing at in the early minutes of 1957 on a bristling cold night, forty miles south of the British Columbia border in eastern Washington State. The Pepsi-Cola thermometer on the screened porch of my cousin Ray Johnson’s house read minus 18.
Ray and Edith and their son Robert, who was four years older than I, lived on the Tiger road seven miles northeast of Colville. Mill Creek was five minutes south of the house on a path through a meadow where the grass was up to my waist and full of garter snakes in summer. The place names are mythic to me still, decades after I understood that the people who homesteaded on Deadman Creek and Gold Creek lost their homesteads to Lake Roosevelt when Grand Coulee Dam was built and the Columbia River rose. They were Oakies, whether or not they made their way to the Columbia watershed from Appalachia through Oklahoma in a Diamond Reo or from Sweden on the cheapest boat they could fine. Some of these people attended school, most never finished high school, and not one of them went to college. But they all did real well; a lot of them made more money than I ever will. They remain mythic to me along with the places; it’s just that now I have their mythic stature in perspective.
I was out on the packed snow in the freezing splendor of New Year’s Eve night making a pop run. Ray was a Pepsi distributor, and his warehouse, with the white, blue and red Pepsi delivery truck and all the pop, was there on his acreage. I was alone because Robert was sick. He’d been sneaking whiskey since the poker game started and hadn’t even made it to nine o’clock. I would sneak plenty of whiskey on subsequent New Year’s Eves, but then I couldn’t even stand the smell. I’d stood in front of the big black-and- white Zenith and watched the ball drop and the New Yorkers celebrate in Time Square. Mom and Gram, great aunt Dorothy Dillman and Edie Johnson turned in their chairs at the table, but the men kept their eyes on their cards. Midnight came three hours later for us, of course, and they’d stopped the game then, wished one another a Happy New Year and had s’ing t’ eat, as my Mom’s father, Bert Thompson, whom I called Pop, said; it meant something to eat. For us the only thing on TV at midnight was the test pattern. Maybe you’ve seen it: a small black circle inside a larger black circle, and between them at the top, a black-and-white likeness of a Native American in full headdress.
When we work with Narrative or Screenwriting, among all the other things we talk about, we talk about creating moments, and what a moment life created for me … for little ten-year-old Terry Davis, person-to-be.
This was fifty-six years ago, and I still hear the crackling silence; I turn a circle and see the deep dark of the hunkered mountains and the shallow dark of the snowy meadow. The creek was down there running too fast to freeze and too far away for me to hear. I see, too, the colored lights around the top of Ray’s and Edith’s porch; I turn full circle again, and I see the big pole shed I thought of as a warehouse. And then I look up at the Milky Way, that beach of light, like someone threw a thick navy blue wool blanket on the dining room table to play cards, then someone dumped a pick-up load of diamonds on it and they tumbled out and filled forever: there are as many worlds up there and beyond, they say now, as all the grains of sand on all the beaches on all the bodies of water on Earth.
A monsoon of beauty rained down on me. It was, indeed, a drenching beauty, as Louise Erdrich says. No supernatural voice needed to tell me that I was less than a dust mote in the vastness I saw and felt. But I was something. I was a system of matter and energy. The awareness in me of myself, which is consciousness, attained knowledge of itself in that moment of fulfillment. Something in me understood that mine was a tiny part and a brief residence in the grander system. This is not what I said to myself; I wasn’t capable of saying it; I can say now that this is what I felt.
Nobody had to tell me life was short. We had taken my dad’s dad, Harry Davis out of the Veterans Hospital in Spokane to drive up with us. And Ray and Edith’s older son, Art, had been electrocuted that fall in the little radio station where he worked in Oregon. Dad told me that Ray’s first words on the phone had been, “I lost my boy.” Why would I remember that little sentence for almost sixty years? Some of the reason lies in what happened to me that night under the stars.
I did not suddenly manifest signs of intelligence; I did not go back in the house and apply for early admission to Stanford. What I did was open the door to the warehouse, switch on the lights and fill my doubled grocery bag with glass quart bottles of Pepsi and Canada Dry ginger ale. We called these mixers because the adults mixed them with whiskey.
But my life did change: it was that sense of awareness of myself and of the life around me.
I loved watching these people play poker and sit around bantering. Nobody got drunk. It was fun to see them together with people they’d known most of their lives. They were different than they were with me. My father hardly ever laughed at home, but he laughed a lot playing poker at Rays and Edith’s on every New Year’s Eve. And he was quick-witted and funny. It was a thrill to see my father happy.
I go outside on a freezing winter night, and I see that place and those people in my mind. They’re all gone, and I’m a good deal older now than my parents were then. But the same stars are still up in that cold, black, beautiful sky.
I remember the moment I became conscious of myself in the Cosmos. Yes, I know the word is elevated beyond my low-rent scribblings and belongs to Carl Sagan, anyway, bless his soul. But that’s the word I want because it means the whole cosmic system of matter and energy, which is precisely what I mean, rather than “in the world.” Back then, in the Fifties, we didn’t know the fantastic extent of the cosmos. I learned that the Milky Way was the universe, and that’s what I was gazing at in the early minutes of 1957 on a bristling cold night, forty miles south of the British Columbia border in eastern Washington State. The Pepsi-Cola thermometer on the screened porch of my cousin Ray Johnson’s house read minus 18.
Ray and Edith and their son Robert, who was four years older than I, lived on the Tiger road seven miles northeast of Colville. Mill Creek was five minutes south of the house on a path through a meadow where the grass was up to my waist and full of garter snakes in summer. The place names are mythic to me still, decades after I understood that the people who homesteaded on Deadman Creek and Gold Creek lost their homesteads to Lake Roosevelt when Grand Coulee Dam was built and the Columbia River rose. They were Oakies, whether or not they made their way to the Columbia watershed from Appalachia through Oklahoma in a Diamond Reo or from Sweden on the cheapest boat they could fine. Some of these people attended school, most never finished high school, and not one of them went to college. But they all did real well; a lot of them made more money than I ever will. They remain mythic to me along with the places; it’s just that now I have their mythic stature in perspective.
I was out on the packed snow in the freezing splendor of New Year’s Eve night making a pop run. Ray was a Pepsi distributor, and his warehouse, with the white, blue and red Pepsi delivery truck and all the pop, was there on his acreage. I was alone because Robert was sick. He’d been sneaking whiskey since the poker game started and hadn’t even made it to nine o’clock. I would sneak plenty of whiskey on subsequent New Year’s Eves, but then I couldn’t even stand the smell. I’d stood in front of the big black-and- white Zenith and watched the ball drop and the New Yorkers celebrate in Time Square. Mom and Gram, great aunt Dorothy Dillman and Edie Johnson turned in their chairs at the table, but the men kept their eyes on their cards. Midnight came three hours later for us, of course, and they’d stopped the game then, wished one another a Happy New Year and had s’ing t’ eat, as my Mom’s father, Bert Thompson, whom I called Pop, said; it meant something to eat. For us the only thing on TV at midnight was the test pattern. Maybe you’ve seen it: a small black circle inside a larger black circle, and between them at the top, a black-and-white likeness of a Native American in full headdress.
When we work with Narrative or Screenwriting, among all the other things we talk about, we talk about creating moments, and what a moment life created for me … for little ten-year-old Terry Davis, person-to-be.
This was fifty-six years ago, and I still hear the crackling silence; I turn a circle and see the deep dark of the hunkered mountains and the shallow dark of the snowy meadow. The creek was down there running too fast to freeze and too far away for me to hear. I see, too, the colored lights around the top of Ray’s and Edith’s porch; I turn full circle again, and I see the big pole shed I thought of as a warehouse. And then I look up at the Milky Way, that beach of light, like someone threw a thick navy blue wool blanket on the dining room table to play cards, then someone dumped a pick-up load of diamonds on it and they tumbled out and filled forever: there are as many worlds up there and beyond, they say now, as all the grains of sand on all the beaches on all the bodies of water on Earth.
A monsoon of beauty rained down on me. It was, indeed, a drenching beauty, as Louise Erdrich says. No supernatural voice needed to tell me that I was less than a dust mote in the vastness I saw and felt. But I was something. I was a system of matter and energy. The awareness in me of myself, which is consciousness, attained knowledge of itself in that moment of fulfillment. Something in me understood that mine was a tiny part and a brief residence in the grander system. This is not what I said to myself; I wasn’t capable of saying it; I can say now that this is what I felt.
Nobody had to tell me life was short. We had taken my dad’s dad, Harry Davis out of the Veterans Hospital in Spokane to drive up with us. And Ray and Edith’s older son, Art, had been electrocuted that fall in the little radio station where he worked in Oregon. Dad told me that Ray’s first words on the phone had been, “I lost my boy.” Why would I remember that little sentence for almost sixty years? Some of the reason lies in what happened to me that night under the stars.
I did not suddenly manifest signs of intelligence; I did not go back in the house and apply for early admission to Stanford. What I did was open the door to the warehouse, switch on the lights and fill my doubled grocery bag with glass quart bottles of Pepsi and Canada Dry ginger ale. We called these mixers because the adults mixed them with whiskey.
But my life did change: it was that sense of awareness of myself and of the life around me.
I loved watching these people play poker and sit around bantering. Nobody got drunk. It was fun to see them together with people they’d known most of their lives. They were different than they were with me. My father hardly ever laughed at home, but he laughed a lot playing poker at Rays and Edith’s on every New Year’s Eve. And he was quick-witted and funny. It was a thrill to see my father happy.
I go outside on a freezing winter night, and I see that place and those people in my mind. They’re all gone, and I’m a good deal older now than my parents were then. But the same stars are still up in that cold, black, beautiful sky.
