DARK SKY AS VERB
By Erica Soon Olsen
In or around March 2020, the night sky changed. A neighbor in the canyon called reporting strange lights passing over our house. UFOs! They streamed across the sky, one after another. I’d waited all my life to see something like that. Later, we found out what it was: a Starlink satellite constellation, in low-Earth orbit, launched by SpaceX for internet access.
This is northeast Utah, near two dark-sky parks. Like other parks, these call attention to something special — a history, a wilderness — in a way that could make you grieve the loss of things in other places. Museum skies. What we dark-sky now is our responsibility. Moths, the Milky Way, the Pleiades’ bright smear. Smoke from the East Fork fire, smoke from Oregon.
Erica Soon Olsen is the author of “Recapture & Other Stories,” a collection of short fiction about the once and future West, and “Girlmine,” a micro-chapbook of flash fiction about the uneasy ways we live in the natural world. She lives in Vernal.