Free At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

gotten up early ever since I was a boy in West Texas,” he told me. “You’d look out of the window at dawn, and the sky would stretch on forever. It was a special creamycolor at that hour, before the clouds came. It was the only time when it was cool. The morning was clean and blank and full of promise, like a piece of paper no one had written on yet. I couldn’t wait to jump out of bed and invent something: a car, an airplane, a vacuum cleaner made from a spice can. By sunset, the day was used up, exhausted. Night was a time of disappointment, when you thought aboutall the things you’d hoped to do and hadn’t done. There’s nothing as sad and lonely as the bark of a coyote somewhere off in the West Texas night, and the moon hanging outside your window as bone-white as an old cow skull.”
    That’s persuasive testimony, but it’s not going to make me jump out of bed at five any more than a panegyric by a white water lily on the splendors of the morning is goingto make the evening primrose transplant itself in Linnaeus’s 6:00 A.M. flower bed. My suprachiasmatic nucleus is stuck in the owl position, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Dawns are all very well (though I generally see them after staying up all night, when I may betoo sleepy to appreciate them), but they can’t hold a candle to a full moon, an aurora borealis, a meteor shower, or a comet.

    In March of 1986, I was climbing with a friend on the Tasman Glacier in New Zealand. It occurred to us that if we got up at 1:00 A.M. and walked northeast across the glacier, we might be able to see Halley’s Comet, which was making its every-seventy-sixth-year swing that month and could be best viewed (or so we had read) from the Southern Hemisphere. For my larkish companion, 1:00 A.M. was anearly start; for me, it was simply an excuse to postpone my bedtime. We left the Tasman Saddle promptly at one, roped up, and put on our crampons in what seemed at first like pitch darkness but soon, once our eyes grew accustomed to the light of thousands of stars reflected on the shimmering glacier, seemed more like dusk. After crunching a mile or so across the clean hard snow, which had been unpleasantlyslushy in the afternoon sun, we stopped on a narrow col with a thousand-foot drop-off on either side. And there it was: a small white cornucopia above the northern horizon, not solid, but delicately stippled, as if produced by a heavenly dot-matrix printer. We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the cometwas above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.
    Surely the best thing about camping is the night. Night is what differentiates a camping trip from a series of day hikes. There are few greater pleasures thanstretching out in your tent, inside which a glowing candle lantern makes your muddy boots and damp wool socks look as if they werepainted by Georges de La Tour, and glimpsing, through the open flap, the corner of a constellation that is invisible from your hometown. (Since I live in New York City, that includes just about everything, even the Big Dipper.) There are sounds you wouldn’t hear at home, either: crickets, cicadas, tree frogs, loons, owls—even, on a memorable Catskills backpacking trip in my husband’s youth, the urgentrustles of copulating porcupines. The contrast between the infinite space outside the tent and the cozily delimited interior, whose little zippers and pouches (for glasses, handkerchiefs, pocketknives) form a miniature simulacrum of a well-ordered pantry, nudges my memory back to the houses I used to make in my childhood by suspending a blanket over a table, dragging in a tray of cocoa and cookies,and creating a private domestic zone in which the temperature was always warm and the light was always crepuscular. Hell may be a dark place, but so is the womb.
    My husband inherited his larkishness,