The Big Dipper is leaking and the Moon is a Ghost

The Big Dipper is leaking.


Stepped out early one morning last week, well before dawn, with Nutmeg. Looked up at the still-dark sky filled with brilliant stars just in time to see a streak escaping the lip of the Big Dipper constellation. A shooting star! Just a couple of weeks ago I saw two shooting stars in one evening while sitting at an outdoor presentation on the universe and space. Now that the humidity and haze of the monsoons are relieved by the arrival of fall, the skies are crystal again. The Milky Way is again stretched across the heaven as though it’s replacing the earth-bound rivers that have dried in their beds until the next monsoon season.

The presentation was offered by an astronomer named Gary Emerson. Gary is now an amateur astronomer. Amateur only because he’s no longer paid for his passion. His particular passions have included designing the imaging technologies on satellites such as Magellan, Galileo, Voyager and, most recently, the Hubble Telescope. Can you imagine sitting in the dark and watching images projected against a stucco wall, taking you right up into the stars, riding on the wing of a satellite with one of the people who made the images possible! Looking up at the stars on his direction and seeing streaks of light making exclamation marks.

The ghost moon is setting.
This morning, the full moon was a dawn ghost, appearing on the horizon at 8 am large as a silver dollar sitting on edge and glowing with reflected light.

A fitting start for a day trip to the ghost town of Mogollon (pronounced Muggy-yown) up in the Gila National Forest. The town is an old mining town that is said to be the “ghost town that won’t die.” While many of the buildings have indeed been left to the miners’ ghosts, there is a solid core of fleshandblood people who live there year round and who have taken pains to build lives and livings, and to stabilize and preserve the town. Among the old wooden and stone structures are a general store, a theater, a church, several old houses and outbuildings, old stone buildings with filmy windows and fading painted signs and an old gasoline pump surrounded by cars that must have died waiting for a gasoline delivery. Among the living structures are the Purple Onion Café, an antiques and collectibles business, an art gallery and the Cemetery’s archive. Here are my flikr images from Mogollon.

The day was blue and gold, cool and crisp – a perfect fall day. We drove out through the Gila valley, crossing the Gila River at several points. This was the landscape that was verdantly green just weeks ago and full of wild sunflowers and other summer blooms. Now the fall has burnished the hillsides into shades of bronze and copper, yet still spangled with scatters of yellow flowers. To reach the town of Mogollon, we climbed 2,000 feet in elevation and then dropped vertically almost that far into a deep, narrow canyon to find the town, ghost and living, spread along Silver Creek. The road is not for the faint of heart or stomach. It is as wide as a king bed and has no guard rails. We were assured by one resident that in the 35 years she’s lived in Mogollon, they’ve never had to call an ambulance for an accident. Going back upthendown snake curves, blindly trusting that everyone who was coming to Mogollon today was already there and not heading uphill to meet me on the next hairpin, I thought they wouldn’t need an ambulance – any old hearse would do if I went over the edge!

We were lucky. Today was their last day open for the season. The next big cloud could bring them snow. The living will be bringing in wood and wrapping windows soon. Who knows what the ghosts do to prepare for winter.

By the way, it dawned on me (pun intended) the morning I saw my third shooting star in two weeks: Chicken Little was right. The sky does fall – one star at a time. Chicken was just a little too literal.