STEALING TIME
It was early evening, but the darkness felt like midnight. Our stout, 38-foot Marine Trader trawler Mazurka chugged along, a little toy boat in the middle of the biggest and coldest of the Great Lakes.
We had spent the summer boating in the endless light of the 47th parallel. Now, in the last weekend of September, the black sky enveloped us. In the east, Mars shone like a beacon above the Apostle’s Sand Island, almost at the closest point in the planet’s orbit to Earth.
My husband, Mark, sat at the helm. Our 6-year-old slept in the aft cabin. Our 10-year-old slept in the forward V-berth. Our 8-year-old daughter found the dark and the cold air exhilarating. Wrapped in a blanket, we sat together at the bow. She looked up.
“What is that?”
Above us, a thick white scarf stretched across the sky, a glittering shawl pulled by one of Apollo’s muses.
“That’s the Milky Way,” I told her.
Mouths agape, heads back, we stared up at the night sky, watching our galaxy extend from Minnesota’s Sawtooth Mountains across the dome to Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. I told her of millions of stars, how we are positioned in one tiny corner of the huge spiral-shaped galaxy. The engine purred on.
