The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  My father was happier than I was, until I told him one more time that I didn’t want to be a doctor. Since the open house, I had insisted to him that I was going to be an astronomer. He gave me a harsh lecture during my next visit. It was one of our few weekends together that felt too long rather than too short.

  “You have to get a job and support yourself,” he said. “And. Not. Rely. On. Any. Man.” My father’s resistance to my ambitions struck me as ironic. A psychic had once told him that he’d be a household name, and by the early 1990s he had earned an unlikely fame for his own unconventional path: The Seager Hair Transplant Centre and its ubiquitous billboards still celebrate him more than a decade after his death. He credited no small part of his achievements to The Magic of Believing. But when it came to his daughter’s future, he wasn’t quite so willing to challenge the Fates.

  Nobody made a success of themselves by trading in abstraction, he scolded. “The world wants evidence,” he said, nearly shouting. “The world wants proof.” I heard him, but I didn’t listen. Jupiter had already made its greater case.

  * * *

  ●

  There’s a famous play, Equus, about a troubled boy with a blinding love of horses. The boy sees a psychiatrist named Martin Dysart, who tries to understand him by trying to understand his love. Dysart is confounded by it:

  A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all—just those particular moments of experience and no others—I don’t know.

  I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters. Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own. Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers.

  But there’s more to my love than that. When I think of the stars I feel an almost physical pull. I don’t just want to look at them. I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth. I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone. Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me—but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Change of Course

  There were thousands of miles between us and the top of the world, and I hadn’t seen a single inch of them. Every step ahead of us would be pure discovery. I felt a charge run through my entire body: the electric thrill of the unknown. Up there, I knew nothing.

  According to the boundaries on our still-crisp map, we were in northern Saskatchewan. Now those lines seemed meaningless to me, a futile attempt to impose order in the absence of anything human-scale. Saskatchewan is a giant rectangle on paper, but we were in a place that defied such conventional geometry. There were no landmarks, no crossroads, none of the usual signs or sharp corners that we use to find our way. There were only rocks, trees, and rivers, stretched out in a tangle as infinite-seeming as time.

  It was June 1994. I’d just finished my bachelor’s degree in math and physics at the University of Toronto. The past two summers, I’d interned at the David Dunlap Observatory not far outside the city, dividing my time between observing and classifying variable stars—stars whose brightness varies—and reading the leather-bound astronomy books that I pulled from the ladder-tall shelves. I’d also been drawn more deeply into the wilderness, taking canoe trips under the canopy of lights I’d first seen at Bon Echo. I decided to take a long break before I waded into my graduate work at Harvard and devote it to the trip of a lifetime: two months in a canoe in Canada’s remote northern reaches, beyond the last of the trees.

  The focus and discipline of university had erased the last vestiges of my vagabond adolescence, but I remained restless, given to fits of mental and physical wandering. I was never satisfied with the world in front of me. There always had to be more. Once again a book changed the course of my life: Sleeping Island, written by a man who left his schoolteacher life in Boston one summer to explore the great Barren Lands by canoe. It set me dreaming about an epic traverse. I spent my last undergrad winter in the library, poring over maps and accounts of century-old expeditions written by the low light of lanterns. Even in sepia, the Arctic was an otherworldly landscape, made up of nearly as much water as earth. In the north in summer, under the glare of a midnight sun, there could seem to be more lakes than stars.

  I joined the Wilderness Canoe Association in Toronto to prepare for my own journey. One weekend I needed a ride to a backcountry ski trip (organized while we waited for the rivers to thaw), and a club member named Mike Wevrick offered me a lift. When I arrived—late—for our rendezvous, I found him in his beat-up car reading a slightly less-worn paperback. Between his book, his beard, and his mop of ginger hair, I couldn’t see much of his face. His eyes were his only defining feature, the same blue as the winter sky.

  We spent five hours in the car together, bound for Killarney Provincial Park near Sudbury, Ontario, where we skied with a group through the forest, the trees clinging like mountain goats to the steep terrain. Mike said that he was impressed with my skiing. I wasn’t impressed with his, especially when he decided to end the day early and grab a donut from a nearby Tim Hortons. I wanted to ski until dark.

  Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him. He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month. I rejected him exactly as often. I thought I understood what he saw in me—I really was a pretty good skier—and maybe a little of what he saw in us. We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both loved the outdoors. That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together? The truth was, the highest register on my human-companionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didn’t bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason.

  I had felt a tiny spark with Mike, but nothing like the lightning strikes you see in movies. Was a tiny spark a good enough reason to let him in? I didn’t think so. Besides, I’d be leaving Toronto at the end of the summer. Harvard’s Department of Astronomy had accepted me into its graduate program the day we’d gone skiing at Killarney. There was no point in starting something that would end before it had a chance to begin.

  “Do you want to go skiing again?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do you want to go hiking in the White Mountains?”

  “No. But don’t take it personally. I’m leaving in September and I’ll be closer to the White Mountains anyway.”

  Then one day in March, Mike called with word that the ice had broken on the Humber River: “Do you want to jump in a canoe?” The Humber ran through the city and wasn’t especially picturesque, but I loved paddling more than anything. Mike finally heard me say yes, even if it was the water I wanted, not him.

  The following weekend saw us pushing into a set of artificial rapids—the spill from a dam—and we began rehearsing white-water maneuvers. We were out of practice and sync, and within a few minutes we had capsized Mike’s canoe, a battered Old Town Tripper. I’d worn a wetsuit, but I was still cold and wet and not all that happy with Mike. It wasn’t until later, back at his house for a warm-up, that I fully realized he’d shaved off his beard and trimmed his hair into a crew cut. He looked better cleaned up. He’d also stripped off his wetsuit down to the pair of tiny shorts he’d worn underneath. His muscles rippled lik
e the water we had paddled. Wow, I thought. He’s cute. I wondered whether starting something wasn’t such a bad idea.

  We paddled together a lot that spring. We began to click in inexpressible ways and started our reasonable facsimile of dating. Even though he was my version of a boyfriend, I preferred to call him my canoe partner. I was thrilled to find someone with whom I could share a boat. Every one of our dates included time on the water, and we built a quiet understanding. Our talks meandered between sets of rapids like the river itself, and our paddling filled the silences. Mike was an editor who worked with words the way I studied light. We both spent a lot of time inside our own heads, trying to bend elusive things into shape. We found that we could be alone together.

  I told Mike about my ambitious travel plans for that summer. Like most of my plans, they didn’t include company. But I knew that he would see what I saw in my dreams: wild rivers, untouched forests, the abandoned Old North Trail tapering into the blankest possible canvas. My imagination had become a storybook, the title of each chapter the name of another lake: Kasba, Ennadai, Angikuni, Nowleye, Casimir, Mallet. Their Native and Inuit names sounded so exotic to my ears. Over the course of the next few weeks, Mike hinted that he wanted to join me in exploring them. The more I thought about it, the more I had to make an important concession to reality: It was a little crazy for me to think I could tackle the trip on my own. Mike would make an ideal partner, in more ways than one. I said okay. Why don’t you join me?

  One night, we took a break from preparing for our adventure to go for a walk in a heavy rain. Mike held a black umbrella over both of us. On that pitch-black night, over the sound of the rain pouring off the roof that he’d made above our heads, Mike made up his mind to speak. “I’ve never been this comfortable with someone before,” he said. I don’t remember if I agreed out loud, but inside I nodded. I was still learning how to navigate my widening emotions, and I marveled at myself for a few minutes. I was charged with excitement, eager about everything that was ahead of us, whatever everything might be. I had never felt that way before. It was like finding out that your heart could do something new.

  * * *

  ●

  The itch to go north had been mine but the canoe was Mike’s, his Old Town Tripper. After launching into the relative calm of a river, we paddled into our first of those alien lakes, an inland sea called Wollaston. Looking across its numbing expanse, I wondered how I had ever thought that I might make such a trip alone.

  After crossing Wollaston, we spent the first two weeks of our trip mostly river-bound. We shot terrifying, thumping rapids. It often felt as though we weren’t choosing where to go; the rivers almost always made our decisions for us. They were swollen with melt, and we were sucked into rapids that were well beyond my expertise. You have to be careful traveling in a single boat in such a lonely region. You can scream as loud as you want and no one will hear you, and if you lose your canoe, the chances are good that you’ll be lost with it.

  There were often rapids too big for us to run. I liked watching Mike in those moments, surveying the steam of the river ahead of us. I admired the calmness of his decision-making. We’d pull up to the bank and begin hauling our canoe and hundreds of pounds of gear on our backs. It felt as though we were traveling in the truest sense. We earned the ground that we covered. Northern Saskatchewan overwhelmed us with its rough-hewn beauty, its eskers covered in white spruce and the bleached remains of ancient travelers: fire rings and tin cans, old boots and caribou bones almost silver in the sun. We never saw another living soul, unless you believe that blackflies have souls, in which case we saw millions of them.

  A lot of the ground had been burnt over, and there was a haze and the smell of smoke in the air. We had no way of knowing whether the low Arctic’s annual bloom of forest fires was getting started or burning itself out, whether we were walking into or out of danger. We knew that the fires were out there, but they were invisible to us. We could judge them only by the mysterious patterns of their smoke.

  Nearing the end of our journey upstream, we were paddling through a narrows, maybe 100 feet across, when we drifted into smoke of a different character. It was almost solid, as opaque as a wall. We got out of our canoe and climbed an esker to get a better view of what lay ahead. For the first time we could see the actual fires, their flames reaching for the sky like fountains.

  “I don’t think we’re in any real danger,” Mike said. He was optimistic like that, often naively, I thought. In his wishful thinking, he was able to ignore the plainest unhappy evidence. I was more led by facts and their simple calculus. If I looked up at black skies and said it was going to rain, Mike would counter that it might not. My analysis usually proved correct; unfortunately, this time was no different. The instant he finished his hopeful thought, a nearby stand of trees went up in flames. The inferno arrived so suddenly, in a blaze of orange accompanied by oily gray smoke, it felt as though a bomb had gone off.

  Now the fire was loud enough to hear, roaring with white noise, like the rapids I wished we were running to escape it. I was paralyzed with fear. Those flames could leap across the narrows and consume us in an instant, and I struggled to convince my legs to carry me back to the canoe. Mike stared at me with a look that’s still hard for me to describe: equal parts worry and resolve. We both thought we were doomed. We both tried to imagine we weren’t.

  We retreated back to the top of the sandy, relatively treeless esker and hunkered down for either the shortest or longest night of our lives. I peeked outside the tent in the twilight of the short northern night, hoping against hope that the smoke had cleared in the semidarkness. It was so thick I could barely breathe.

  I decided that we were going to suffocate in our sleeping bags, our bones joining the carcasses of all those fallen caribou. Somehow I fell asleep, and I had the most vivid dream, that we woke up to a few small, smoldering fires scattered across the landscape. When I woke up, the winds had changed. The smoke had thinned, and in a couple of hours the fire had been swallowed by the ground. Mike and I had never packed up camp so quickly, and we began to struggle up the last of the narrows. The water was maddeningly low. We had to wade, dragging the canoe over the rocks, for what felt like interminable passages. At last we broke into the cool, wide-open waters of Kasba Lake. We found an unlikely safety in its expanse.

  That night on the esker moved me deeply. I’d studied physics, and physics is a science founded on the rules of logic and law. I knew then and I know now that the weather is governed by geographic and atmospheric forces, that no power higher than a fortuitous change in the wind conspired to save us that morning. It was still humbling to witness how much of our lives can depend on forces beyond our control.

  We stopped at a remote fishing lodge on Kasba Lake, where we had shipped ahead our resupply. It was the only permanent shelter for hundreds of miles. We ate our weight in home-cooked lake trout and spent the night in a cabin—reveling in the bed, resenting the roof—and then continued our trip north. We paddled beyond the last of the boreal forest, into the treeless tundra of what is now called Nunavut. It was a new world. We began seeing herds of live caribou, not just their skeletons. We stumbled upon Inuit graves. We caught giant fish and cooked them on stone beaches. We spent week after week navigating our way through difficult stretches of river and portaging across boulder fields, plunging our canoe into lakes in moments of ecstatic release.

  Mike and I had found a routine all our own; we didn’t have to make room for anybody or anything other than each other. We had both stopped wearing watches. The sun was our clock. We ate when we were hungry, which was most of the time. We slept when we were tired, which was the rest of the time. The calendar that we had nearly forgotten existed finally forced us to loop around and head back south, returning from what might have been the surface of the moon to the subtle signs of humanity and the unfamiliar shelter of trees.

  “I’ve decided I r
eally like trees,” Mike said.

  “I’ve decided I really like trees, too,” I said.

  We ended up back at the lodge on Kasba Lake and had our first conversations in weeks with people other than each other, strange faces the starkest reminder that the universe was larger than our canoe. Mike and I had lost a day along the way, and we arrived just in time for the season’s last flight out. I didn’t feel relief. I was devastated to join the geese on their airborne migrations. I felt sorry that we weren’t forced to winter over, as though this time we had been on the wrong side of a close call. I had spent sixty days living my perfect life: alone except for one dreamy companion, together visiting places that no one had seen, escorted by just enough fear to feel a constant low crackle.

  I hadn’t been struck by lightning. But I had fallen in more than one kind of love.

  CHAPTER 3

  Two Moons

  The trip changed me. I emerged at the end of it not just a different person; I felt like a visitor to my former world. I had lost the calluses that protect us from its constant bumps and bruises. Former inconveniences—sitting in traffic, hearing a phone ring, suffering through inane chatter—felt like nightmares. Only a little pollution made my lungs hurt; spending time in closed-in places made the rest of me ache even worse. Harvard has a bucolic campus in the fall, an immaculate collection of red bricks and turning trees, and Cambridge isn’t Los Angeles at rush hour. I still struggled under a psychic weight, as though the sky were a ceiling that was too low.

  I lasted about two months in a graduate student dorm on campus before I fled to Shirley, Massachusetts, an old Shaker village in Middlesex County. I found a nineteenth-century carriage house that had been converted, not all that well, into a residence. It was heaven for me. There was a Christmas tree farm across the road, and I became close to Beth and Will, the couple who owned it. There was a pond for swimming or a peaceful paddle. When it snowed, I could go cross-country skiing for hours right from my door. There was also a pretty river nearby, the Squannacook, with a gorgeous stretch of rapids I visited whenever big rains came and the water was high enough to run.