The galaxy, not the beautiful Greek princess who gave it its name. But—okay—let’s look at Andromeda the princess: because human beauty made the gods jealous, she was chained naked to a rock in the ocean, destined to be devoured by a sea monster. But the Greek hero Perseus killed the monster with his sword, rescued Andromeda, married her and had seven sons and two daughters with her. Neither of the daughters, Autochthe or Gorgophone, ended up chained to rocks, possibly because they weren’t as beautiful as their mother, possibly because the gods thought their names were enough punishment.
The galaxy: Its enhanced photo serves as a backdrop for my computer screen. It’s two-and-a-half million light-years from earth, has a diameter of a quarter-million light-years, and is heading toward us at seventy-two miles per second. It will merge with our Milky Way in five to ten billion years, depending on how you define “merge.” For most of the merger, our sun will be a white dwarf.
Andromeda is the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye, if you have a clear night and no cataracts.
Andromeda contains a trillion stars. From the perspectives of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and the Very Large Array Radio Telescope, it is pure light framed by the blackness of space. Tendrils of dust swirl around a bright center, and false-color images keyed to radio, ultraviolet, infrared, and X-ray spectra reveal luminous rings, swirls, shadows, chasms, maelstroms, and the fading embers of exploded suns. It is a realm of beauty so far distant from the human that if, as some cosmologists postulate, the universe is the Mind of God, the only possible attitude God could have toward the human is a preference for something more imposing and less depressing.
Andromeda reminds me that in this universe, I don’t amount to a hill of beans, or even one bean, or even a molecule of bean protein. That’s true at any stage of my life, and it would be true no matter how much I might have accomplished in an alternate life. President, the Medal of Honor, the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Eagle Scout, 33rd-Degree Mason, Cardinal, Commissar—these mean nothing compared to that dim and fuzzy little cloud in our night sky.
If two-thirds of its trillion stars have planets, and one in a hundred of those planets have conditions that have given rise to life, and one in a hundred of those develop intelligent life, and one in a hundred of those avoided atomic, biological, and chemical warfare long enough to construct a civilization kinder and gentler than our own, God would have 667,000 happier places to think about whenever he gets introspective.
Andromeda is only one of billions and maybe trillions of galaxies. There is no end to them as far as anybody has been able to tell.
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After a long and cold winter in Sawtooth Valley, Julie and I packed suitcases and a cooler and headed south to Twin Falls, and then to Pocatello, and then to Lava Hot Springs and the Riverside Hotel.
The Riverside is a good place to start a road trip. It was built in 1914 and is a little worse for a century-plus of wear, but it has a good restaurant on the ground floor, rooms with high ceilings and soft mattresses, and the hot pools are just a block away. We try to visit every six months or so.
At the pools, the water comes out of the ground at 112 degrees. It’s hard to stay in the hottest pool for more than a few minutes. Fortunately, the next pool is only 106 or so, and then two large jacuzzi pools at 104, and then a big cool pool that’s only a hundred. The last is the most crowded, so Julie and I stay in one of the jacuzzi pools. If we get too hot, we sit on the pool edge until we cool off.
Julie and I spent an hour letting the hot water melt the months of cold weather that had seeped into our bones. It had been a good winter, with lots of backcountry skiing and enough solitude to see us through the coming frenzy of tourist season, but we were ready for warmth and the laughter of our fellow humans.
A wide variety of humans shared the pools with us. Julie and I weren’t the oldest, or the biggest, or the most beautiful. The atmosphere was insular. Laughter was at a minimum for a place dedicated to having fun. People had created their own little islands, looking inward even when they were the only person in their group.
Even if we’ve put the pandemic out of our minds, it’s changed the direction of our gaze, no matter the social setting.
We went back to the hotel for a glass of wine before dinner. The restaurant was short-handed. Service was slow but we weren’t in a hurry. The delay allowed for an extra glass of wine. The food was good. It conspired with the long hours in the car and the hot water and the wine to make an early evening seem like a late one. We staggered upstairs and went to sleep. At daylight we got up and headed for Utah.
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What, you might ask, has Utah got to do with a galaxy, far, far away? Only this: Utah rests on layers and layers of sand deposited at the bottom of a shallow sea that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean hundreds of millions of years ago. That sand is now the sandstones of the arid Carmel, Temple Cap, Navaho, and Kayenta formations, most of them containing fossils of long extinct marine species.
Utah is to our sense of time what Andromeda is to our perception of space. The stone in the Utah desert is evidence that the Earth was old even before life crawled out of the seas, and before that it was cold dust drifting in space, and before that the theories of cosmologists are labeled Here There Be Monsters.
The petroglyphs on a rock wall outside of Moab take us a thousand years in the past. The rock itself pulls us back millions of years further, tens of billions if we start thinking about how its silicon and oxygen were formed. And if we take an imaginative leap into the geologic future, that rock wall becomes a cloud of suspended mud in a Colorado River whose dams have eroded to nothing, heading for the open water between the island of California and the stumps of the Rocky Mountains.
The timeline doesn’t leave much space for a human life.
The future hasn’t happened yet, and we can’t get there from here anyway. We can’t even occupy the present. Research has indicated that by the time we experience something, neural delays guarantee that the experience is already over.
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After a few days in Moab and Bluff, we ended up in the Far View Hotel at Mesa Verde National Park. It had only been open for a week, and big parts of Mesa Verde were closed, but we got some good hikes in, saw the abandoned great houses of the Ancestral Puebloans, and had dinner in a vast, near-empty restaurant.
After dinner, we returned to our room. It was too cold and windy to sit on our balcony, but the air was crystal-clear. From the big south-facing window in our room we could see a sky full of stars reaching down until they met the lights of Farmington, New Mexico, forty miles away. It was hard to see where the sky ended and the lights of the city began. Farmington looks bigger as a galaxy.
We would have required a map of the heavens to find Andromeda, but it was up there somewhere, if its two-and-a-half-million-year-old light has any relationship to its present existence.
We left in the morning. The first busloads of tour groups were due that afternoon.
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On our way home we visited the quarry at Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border. It’s a rock face filled with half-excavated dinosaur bones enclosed in a big, barnlike building. Inside, you walk on two levels, each of them allowing a close look at hundreds of individual bones. 149 million years ago, a bend in a long-extinct river collected and then silted over hundreds of corpses.
That those dinosaurs didn’t die 66 million years ago means that something other than a meteor got them. It might have been a pandemic.
We were taken aback by the presence of a bus from a Bible college in the parking lot, remembering that Bishop James Ussher’s Biblical arithmetic placed the creation 4004 years before the birth of Christ. Fundamentalist Christians of the sort Bible colleges turn out tend not to have much truck with fossils, usually seeing them as Satan-faked artifacts designed to dupe humans into the tooth-and-claw hell of Darwinism.
But nobody looking at the bones seemed particularly offended, and I thought that maybe by exposing its students to 149 million years of history, the Bible college was giving them an idea of what eternity looked like, and the amount of time they could look forward to if they behaved themselves.
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At that point in our road trip, Julie and I had spent nine days together, and although we were still enjoying each other’s company, we both wanted to get home, brew ourselves a cup of tea, and sit alone with it on opposite ends of the house, quietly trying to make sense of the jumble of images in our memories.
We have been together for 31 years, which is a lot of road trips, a lot of thinking about time and space, a lot of time and space together, a lot of time and space to process.
Julie says that given the chance, she would turn down immortality. She says after a few centuries she would get tired and bored. When she puts it like that, I think that no matter how well eternity started out, a million years in you might start looking at the next eon with dread.
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What saving grace do you have, as a human facing the infinite? Consciousness. The sense of being small but alive. The ability to trust your eyes and ears, even if what they report is beyond your understanding. An appreciation of the human arena, which includes stories of mortal men and women doing the best they can as they grapple with jealous, petty, and sadistic gods and the second-rate monsters they send humanity’s way.
The dark side of consciousness is that it’s a shrink-to-fit phenomenon. Unless you’re careful, the universe ends up the size of your mind, rather than the size of your perceptions. That’s a reduction of reality so extreme that it amounts to a psychosis.
That’s why road trips are a necessity. They keep your mind from disappearing into tiny, ever more irrelevant distractions, even as they show you spaces and times you can’t comprehend.
They do make consciousness more difficult than, say, watching television.
The last day of our trip, we hit the Twin Falls Costco and drove the final couple of hours to Sawtooth Valley. We were happy to reach the thousand square feet of our home, which seemed about the right size for us.
For the moment, we were grateful for the human version of Andromeda and for monsters puny enough to be denied their breakfasts. The beauty of the princess had become preferable to that of the galaxy. At least it had for Julie and me, two people who have, over the years, come to cherish our mortal existence.