Terra Nova Stars

I promised to talk about Terra Nova stars.
The time is 40 years ago. I am 18, just broke up with the boy I started dating at 15. We were still friends. We played in a band together. For three years my world consisted of that circle of friends, my guy, and the boys in the band. Everyone thought we would marry. We both knew we wouldn't. So some things changed, and some stayed the same. All this is the backdrop to where I stepped out of the groove that was my world then.

I went to college to learn graphic design. I kept one foot in my old life, and one foot in my new life.

I joined a group of volunteers who ran a crisis line and drop-in centre for students. I was young enough to think I had advice to give. I was trying to be mature. I wanted to do good. I was more than a little full of myself.

The group decided to take a trip to Terra Nova. Someone knew someone with a house and some property there.  The trip was to forge bonds, talk about how we could do the best job we could do with our crisis line and just get away. It involved a long, twisting and turning road trip to a tiny community where there was no electricity, no phones, and the train tracks seemed to be only thing that anchored the place to the world. There was still a train then. It ran by twice a day, with a long whistle and its percussive, clattering rhythm. It seldom stopped.

It was fall, and the community was centred in the midst of a different landscape than the one I was used to on my rocky coast with scrub evergreens, myrtle and moss. I grew up in the city, but spent my summers in a fishing village on an unforgiving coast. There were no sandy beaches. Terra Nova was nothing like my previous rural experiences. This community was lush with deciduous trees, flaming birch, red maples, rowan and larch. The air was cool enough to make your skin tingle but not so cold you had to bundle in winter clothes. I remember the air tasting different, earthier. We were farther from the coast, and the ocean influence was diluted by the smell of forest, fresh cut wood, and wood smoke from cast iron stoves. A blanket of brilliant leaves covered woods paths.

By candle and lamplight we set up our gear, having wasted the waning light exploring our surroundings. It was a big yellow house, with mostly empty rooms. A carpenter's table and a huge stove dominated the large kitchen. There was an indoor pump from an artesian well. Even as we settled in, I could feel the house's curiosity about us. City kids, fumbling with oil lamps. Do-gooder hippies checking out camp stoves and rustling up wood to feed the old wood stove that heated the house. There was a large clearing in the back of the house, a shed to one side. As the twilight blue turned to navy velvet, several of us went out with a flashlight to find more wood.

Navy turned to black. There were no lights around us. We sat on the ground and turned off the flashlight. To our surprise we could see clearly as our eyes adjusted. Starlight painted the trees and grass with a luminescence, edges outlined. It was a moonless night. We lay back on the grass. And looked up. Wordless.

And this is where and when the stars of Terra Nova made an indelible mark on me. Gazing into that sky, for the first time in my life I truly comprehended that the sky was not like a blanket with pinpricks of light. It was not a ceiling. It was absolutely infinite. Layers of stars stretched back further and further into dimensions that I began to realize I would never comprehend. I was sucked into the sky, into layer after infinite layer until I could see that I was less than a mote in the universe. I was less than the angel on the head of a pin. I was smaller than the smallest particle. The only thing holding me to the ground was a thin layer of gas and the embrace of Mother Earth. A stark realization struck. Very little was stopping me from flying into space. I was mesmerized. I couldn't tear myself away for a very long time.
And I was listening hard.

I cannot explain the music I heard that night, only that perhaps it was the voices of a quadrillion stars, a celestial choir. Or perhaps it came from the Earth itself. But that night I slept deeply, dreaming I was stretched across the universe, and I could touch anywhere. It was a dream that came to me many times over the years. I hope it will come again.

About "the town of Terra Nova"
"Photos of Terra Nova"