October 2009 River Ranch Diary

I love the balance of the equinox, both the vernal and the autumnal. Without someone else’s calculations I may never have realized the perfectly equal lengths of night and day; so I am not quite certain why they mean something special to me. It may well be that I try to imagine what determining an equinox would entail and require. Someone, somewhere in the dim and distant past must have realized something about the lengthening and shortening of days and nights and been sufficiently astute to figure out a way to measure and verify those passings.

I would almost bet that the same person or persons had already become aware of the longest day (in our June) and the longest night (in our December). In the same vein, who among us has, unaided, discovered the stationary North Star, Polaris? What a realization that must have been: “Look at that!!! a star that does not move!!!”

Not the discoveries themselves interests me here, but rather the processes by which they came about—-something we will likely never know if we, ourselves, have not made the same discoveries.

This morning I am at the Broken Heart Ranch waiting for the dawn. In this quiet time I watch the stars begin to fade in the first light of day, and I have been looking at the Big Dipper, Ursa major, by which I locate Polaris and the Little Dipper, Ursa minor; and I watch them disappear in the overwhelming light of day. My thinking has turned to the use people in the world’s northern hemisphere have made of Polaris, the one fixed point in our night, navigation. Navigation on land and sea, contributing to the assurance of where you might be and of the confidence in the ability to return to where you were, from where you had traveled.

On the Broken Heart Ranch as on the Cheyenne River Ranch we know the landmarks by day for getting around and by night we sometimes rely partially on the stars. This morning, however, I am a fixed point about to move. I am no longer alone and the others, who have just arrived, will begin working. The sun rises and reveals a small herd of buffalo about a half mile away. I have been squarely facing the North Star; the buffalo are to my right, ninety degrees, due East. As we have but recently passed the autumnal equinox, this day will be relatively short, no matter how long the work that may be crammed into it. And my last thought in this calm before going to work pictures someone in a wilderness somewhere way, way back when, standing , facing the North Star and imagining the possibility of an equinox and trying to find a way to establish the reality of that imagining; and I flash on “They also serve who only stand and wait.” T.S.Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

And that is when Dan taps on the window of my pickup truck: “Let’s go to work, Gerv. The crew and the buffalo are waiting.”

“I’m there, Dan.” and to myself—“in perfect balance.”