I was looking for Thuban and getting pissed off - not that the Star was hiding. I knew how and where to look for it: It's the Alpha Star in the Constellation of Draco - the Dragon. It's the last star in the Tail that you can see with the naked eye. But you need an unpolluted Night Sky - one not washed in the artificial light of Cities. You need the Dark. The Real Dark. And I wasn't getting any Quality Dark in Green River, Utah. The KOA was crowded and the fat fudgies had their RVs glowing & noise and light spilled out over and around us in a Bubble. I needed some Dark. I had a small Spotter Scope, but I needed the Dark to wield it.
So Lou and I got out the map and found the nearest spot within 300 miles where I could be assured of Deep Dark. The only other time in Skippy's life when he had been privileged to see the Real Dark was when he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a Troop Ship in 1965. You could see Stars from the Waterline up. Billions of them which usually hide in our Light-Polluted Skies. So I was looking for someplace in the middle of a Desert, someplace without towns or burbs or even roads. Someplace without Electricity. Maybe deep in the Rez. Maybe deep in a Park. I needed to get out of the blaring Light and get into the Blackness and Emptiness. Maybe the Canyons.
It was the Luckiest Day of the Century and I had to get the fuck off the Road. I needed the Dark and the Omens were killing me. It was the 7th of July, 1977. Or more simply; it was 7-7-77. And I was 33 - in the middle of my Jesus Year. Lou was 22 and thought it was silly to worry about Numbers and their Significance outside of Quanta - if any. She had a Brand New Degree in Psychology, goddamn it! And she was skeptical of Anything Symbolic. We headed for Hite, Utah - Skippy stuck a red arrow on a Map to help you see the Sitz of the Site. I don't know who put that "Trip Ends Here" line on the map, but it's disturbingly appropriate. We got there in the early afternoon - Hite is a Small White Trailer which is the local Post Office, Store, & Message Center for Canyon Walkers, Gawkers, and Boaters. It's on a Thick Neck of the Colorado River and is an access point for all kinds of Canyon Adventures. It's exactly in the Middle of Nowhere, Amerika. The Creole Woman who ran the Trailer/Store - a young, lithe, girl who someone later described as "real pretty, like a French Nigger" - she said that the River could go 300 feet deep at Hite, depending on the Season, and that they get 8 to 10 a year there. Most of them, she said, are never seen again. But every once in awhile one will shoot up from the deep and float to shore. Remarkably preserved from the cold, cold, deep waters. But that was later - when we arrived, my only plan was to ease back and let the road wash off me and out of me. Then that night, when it got dark I would first find Draco and then Thuban, its Alpha - or Brightest - Star. Thuban was the North Star during the Old Kingdom in Egypt about 5000 years ago. And that was the source of my Existential Angst - it had suddenly dawned on Poor Skippy that Nothing Lasts. Nothing at all. And that Even the North Star is deciduous in Time. There is nothing Fixed and there is nothing which is not Moving. There are no Certainties except this: We have No Axis-Mundi. Not even the gods Outlive the decay of Constellations.
Monkeys have always seen Pictures in the Sky. In fact, the ability to "describe" Star Patterns and Story them into the Seasonal Round we call the Zodiac and the Year, is what it means to be a Monkey. It's depressing, but Constellations are an Illusion - one fostered by the ability to tell Stories - and the Stars that make them up are not bound to the "constellation" and are not travelling with it and will not be around when the trip is over and their light goes out. Constellations are not an Astronomical Unit; they are a Cultural Unit - a Social Construction. They are only visible from Earth's perspective and if you were to leave the Earth and travel off into deep space and then looked for the familiar Constellations they would not be there. Constellations are Visio-Spatial-Temporal Illusions thrown up into the Sky like Hera threw the Serpent up into the Night until it stuck in the Dark and became Draco - the Constellation of the Dragon. So in the Old Kingdom of Egypt the earth revolved around the Dragon and the bright Star in its tail was Thuban - which in Arabic means: Serpent. The Pole Star has always been the Pillar which connected Earth to Heaven and kept the Law, the Dharma, the Maat, Fixed and Undying. Immutable and Certain. All the stars in the sky move - except, it seems, the Pole Star. So it is the Star of Truth and of Kingdom. Of Dynasty and Time. Your fate, as a Civilization is tied to that Undying, Unmoving, Punto Fijo in the North Sky - the Pole Star. The gnosis that it not only moves, but that it decays, that it dies, is very disturbing to Minds which are after Certainty and Truth.
It's called the Precession of the Equinoxes and while no one is sure, most of the Etics think it was Hipparchus of Rhodes, a Greek astronomer, who first noted the Precession and tried to work out its Math. Axial Precession is caused by Gravity - like everything else - and refers to the slow, but continuous, shift in the Orientation & the AOA of an astronomical body's rotational axis. It's a fucking wobble. Think of a spinning top - one with a wobble - the Pole Axis on top of the top traces out a Cone over time. So does the Earth. Wobble. And its Pole also traces out a Cone - one which takes about 26,000 years to complete one circuit. It's called a "Great Year," and the Precession of the Equinoxes. Practically speaking what it means is that The Pole Star appears to be moving off Dead Center. So every 2150 years we need a New Pole Star because the last one has run off on its own circuit which is the "rim of the cone." Hipparchus figured this problem out in about 150 BC and he did it thru Bayesian Analysis. He compared his data with data from his predecessors - noted the discrepancies and followed those until they gave up their rhythms. Look at the Sky Chart next to this. Skippy has pointed out Thuban - the old North Pole Star of the Old Kingdom Egyptians and you can follow the Faggot colored arrow back to Polaris - our Age's Pole Star. The Gay Arrow describes the Conical Rim of the Precession. So Thuban "appears" to have drifted off the Axis-Mundi "that much" in the past 2000 years.
It's what the Hippies were singing about - you know: "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius ..." Poor deluded simpletons. Harmony & Understanding. Yah, that'll happen. Now Skippy is a real bright lad and Astronomy was his first love - he read all the books in the Grand Rapids Public Library on Astronomy back in the mid-1950s when he was between 10 and 14. There weren't a lot of them & the pictures were all in black and white - but the point is that our Skippy knew about and understood the Precession of the Equinoxes since he was 11 - but he only knew in Quanta - like the Woman raised with only black and white who becomes an expert on Color - he had never been overwhelmed by the Qualia of what the Precession did in our Minds. Some Etics have gone so far as to suggest that this gnosis of the Precession was the first Human thought - the first mental act freed of Monkey mentalité. Sure, by 150 BC we knew about Death and we knew that "All Men Must Die," as Aristotle so lovingly put it. But the Precession Motif says something else. Something deeper & something we were going to have to Understand before we could get much further toward the Angels. It says that Everything Must Die - that not even the Perfect Orbits of God's Cosmos are "Perfect" and that they too suffer the Fall. If Celestial Mechanics revealed the Order of God's Mind - then we were in Trouble. My god, maybe Even God must Fall! Maybe gods die.
Draco is a Circumpolar Constellation - it wraps itself around the Pole Star - and therefore it remains visible all night from a place in the Northern latitudes - oh, let's say around the 45th Parallel North. The Dragon winds around Ursa Minor, what we call the Little Dipper. There are only 3 stars in Draco above Magnitude 3.0 so it's not a very bright Constellation. The Cat's Eye Nebula, aka NGC 6543, is in Draco. Run your cursor over the picture above and see what the Cat's Eye "looks like" thru different kinds of telescopes which "scope" different kinds of Wavelengths. There's a lesson in that. What do you suppose a Cat's Eye really looks like? But from what point of view? Change Perspective and/or Filter and what you are viewing Shifts. Wobbles. Changes. So not even what we See is what there is to be Seen. There is no Fixed Spot towards which the Universe advances. We aren't really going anywhere. The Cosmos has no Center. No Direction. And no way to See it for what it Is. Skippy was losing Sleep.
In the years that have passed I have heard and read nothing about the Lost Biker of Cataract Canyon. The day after he drowned we read in a Salt Lake City Paper how there were rushes to get Married on 7-7-77, and about the coincidental births of babies which weighed 7 lbs & 7 ozs, or a birth at 7:07 AM. Women forced their labor to give birth. Las Vegas was deluged with the "Lucky" and the town had its biggest take ever on that day. It was special, the Paper said.
Special because the first Monkeys who had a chance to see two "Luckiest Days of the Century" on their Birthdays were born just Yesterday, the Paper gloated. I had my back against the Sandstone of the 3rd Cove off the Hite Marina Campground, a Red, dusty place 200 miles from anything. I heard the two bikers arrive; now there would be 3 of us in the Kamp. We could hear them unpacking in the Cove next to us but the ledges of the coves were high enough to block any view. Lou and I were tired and numb from the ride, the heat, and our swim out to the raft. There were 4 of them, 2 guys in their early 20s and their biker chicks. But within minutes of their arrival we could hear them laughing and running down out of their cove and diving in the Fast, Cold, Greenish Blue, Colorado River.
Within two minutes Skippy heard it the first time. "He's gone down!" Then there was quiet. "He's gone down!" Skippy knew it had to be one of the bikers, & who the hell was he talking to? Skippy stood up and peered over the cove's ledge into the river. 10 to 15 yards from him was a young man treading water in the river and looking directly into my eyes. "Who's gone down," I asked. "My buddy! He's gone down between us!" I got the Air Mattress, threw it over the cove and into the river and then dove in after it. Skippy's not a good swimmer and the Air mattress would be an anchor.
Click the Good News 9 times for Establishment Shots of the Set. Do this now, before you move on.
First the Biker Buddy went under looking and I held on to the Air Mattress. When he came up we switched places and I went down looking. But it was useless immediately. The river was so deep that it went black within 10 feet and you could see no further into the darkness. It was fast too and in the minute that he had gone missing he could have drifted a hundred yards downstream. The 2 biker chicks were on shore asking what's wrong?
I remember that the Biker Buddy started Chattering, his lips were going blue and he moaned over and over: Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus! When the biker chicks caught on they ran back to the boat landing area to get more help. There were between 15 and 20 people either wrestling with boats or kamped in the other coves on the other side of the landing. When 3 or 4 other men finally got into the water and out to us I was able to coax the Biker Buddy out of the river. He was shivering - more from shock I think than from the cold river. Within minutes the other men in the water also realized that it was foolish to keep splashing around in the river. It had been 5 minutes by then and he wasn't coming up. So within 10 minutes of the Biker being swallowed by the Colorado the water part of the Search/Rescue was given up. The Rescue Party was mostly 50 year old fat drunks and you could hear wives screaming about heart attacks.
Kamp Wisdom had it down as a Cramp. Long ride on a Harley, 105º, Cold, Fast water. Connect the dots. What was so eerie that was within an hour Hite, Utah went back to what it was doing and the biker was given up, lost. It took until 8AM the next morning for the Utah Park Service to Chopper in some kind of Cop - so for the rest of the afternoon and all night, the Kamp just shrugged and got on with it. Mostly everyone got drunk. No one, except the woman in the Trailer had seen the drowned biker at all. She said that he was tall, muscular, and good looking. His Biker Buddy told me later that they both played football for Ohio State and that they had just recently bought their Harley Sportsters, one Red, and the Drowned Biker's was Sky Blue. The Biker chicks spent the rest of the light hours searching the coves downstream. But there was nothing. He got off his bike, he stripped off his clothes, he ran down and into the river and then he disappeared. Poof.
Nothing Lasts. Not even grief, for long when you do not have a body, nothing to focus grief on. He was here. And then he was gone. The Biker simply went away. All thru the night the Drowned Biker Chick would leap out of her empty tent and scream. Then she would run across the tops of the ledges of the cove and throw herself down on the rock. The Biker Buddy would lift her up. Take her back. Put her in her Pup Tent and tell her to get some sleep. That night the stars came out like Skippy had never before seen - not even in the middle of the dark Atlantic. The Milky Way spread across the Night like the Turquoise Belt the Navajo see in the Stars. Draco was easy to spot - it's a huge constellation and when you learn to isolate it and see it all at once it's a stunning illusion if nothing else. Thuban was easy too & no Scope was necessary. And then there was the Paper Wind.
The Darkness came quickly in Cataract Canyon. And after the Dark came the Bats. You heard them first: a whisper, a commotion, a roar. And suddenly the skies were filled with clouds of bats which had poured out of their caves, caverns and coves and were Mealing the sky of the last insects of the Luckiest Day of the Century. Skippy built a fire - that would keep the billion bats away - and as his fire roared and spread its light the Night Sky leapt into a blazing animation. There were Fire Stars and they were Dancing. The Stars were at war with Blazing Demons of light! The millions of Bat Eyes were reflecting my Kampfire and they were roiling and twisting and seemed to be erasing the Stars in back of them. Jesus they were Cancelling the Stars! I sat enveloped in this Paper Wind staring up at the Cosmos as millions of blazing eyes swarmed in the Night and blotted out the heavens. But I had seen Thuban, the Old Kingdom Egyptian Pillar of Stability and I knew that Polaris, our Pillar, our Pole - had less than 150 years on his Watch and the Piscean Age was drowned in the Waters of Aquarius.
This is the End of the Speed Limit in America. You can go Back thru your Browser or Click on this to go to Kenny's Home Page.