As with my other parks, our weekly schedule ended early on our last day of the working week and began late (campfire program) on our first day back, so I effectively had a 72-hour weekend to explore the spectacular Four Corners area of the Southwest. I did lots of sleeping out in vast, arid landscapes.
In our modern world, we have many experiences of going quickly from brightness to darkness or vice versa, so we are aware of the wonderful quickness with which our eyes can adjust to the ambient light. However, for our eyes to dilate completely open takes about 45 minutes of uninterrupted (no flashlights, please) darkness. I like ending the day by sitting still, becoming part of the deepening night with full night vision.
Once I had set up camp and cooled down, I would change into my non-sweaty evening clothes and fix my dinner (no stove – just cereal, powdered milk, raisins, brown sugar, and nutritional yeast stirred together). Then I would gather what I’d need and find a place to slowly chew my dinner, while the Earth turned me into its shadow that is always streaming away from the Sun, through our atmosphere out into space.
At sunset, the inflow of the Sun’s heat will terminate. However, the perpetual outflow of heat from the land around me into outer space will continue. Therefore, the temperature will be dropping throughout the show. If I want to become an unmoving, unshivering part of it, I need to heed the Rules of Flow and keep the outflow of heat from my body less than the slow production of heat from my quiet body’s metabolism. Heat will flow away from me faster as the temperature difference between my body and the air increases. Just as water flows faster down a steeper slope, so my heat will flow away from me faster as the ambient temperature drops. Also, as with so many flows, heat loss is proportional to surface area so I strive to insulate as much of my surface area as I can, decreasing the amount of surface area contacting the cold air.
Cold air sinks, as you can feel if you open a refrigerator bare-footed. In the evening, the day-warmed air cools and sinks to the ground. The cooling air flows downslope and converges, like water, into the desert streambeds. Therefore, I will sit on a high spot, both for the view and to be above that chilling flow of evening air.
Conduction (actual contact with a cold object) is a major source of heat loss that is reduced by increasing the amount of insulation between my warm body and the increasingly-colder ground. I bring an extra pair of thick socks. I fold each one in half, doubling their thick insulation and place them so they will insulate and cushion my sit bones from the ground.
Convection, the movement of air carrying heat from something warm toward something cooler, is another source of heat loss. Before I sit down, I tuck my pant cuffs into the socks I’m wearing. That prevents the warm air around my legs from flowing out through the bottom of my pant legs. I tuck in my shirt and button up my shirt and its sleeves. I turn up the collar, so it will both insulate my neck and hold in the warm air around my chest that wants to rise up around my neck and out into the colder air.
Finally I sit cross-legged to minimize the surface area of my legs. I slowly chew my dinner as I watch the edge of the Earth’s shadow rise above the eastern horizon.
Life’s blessings can be as simple as sitting in the middle of nowhere, watching the Earth turn us into its shadow. The evening bird songs fade into back-and-forth chirps as they nestle down into their cover for the night. As the air cools, summer cricket songs slow and give way to the faint flutter of an occasional foraging bat. The evening’s colors darken from warm oranges and roses to colder blues and purples. First Star appears somewhere overhead, where the sky grows darkest, and then another and another. The early stars flicker into sight. I see a star out of the corner of my eye, but then it disappears when I try to look right at it. A star I spied a minute ago, I now can’t find again. But as the sky darkens, the brighter stars grow prominently obvious. This is how our ancestors learned the stars. The brightest stars are seen first and taught to the youngest before they fall asleep. As children grow older, they stay up later and learn the fainter stars that appear later.
The Sun, now well below the western horizon, is sliding to the right, changing the direction from whence comes the last remnants of reflected sunlight, changing which sections of cliffs are less dark than the others. The dim light is always shifting, even as it fades into darkness. The land loses its obvious colors, but retains a dark, dark purple that brings out the bulk of the land as my eyes fully dilate to maximum openness. Just as deep bass sounds are felt more than heard, so my night vision feels the heft of the land more than sees it..
If I start feeling my warmth diminishing, I put another pair of socks on as mittens. They aren’t instant heat, but they reduce my rate of heat outflow, which shifts my Relative Balance, and a few minutes later, heat has accumulated enough to where I am warm again. My body experiences the reality of the Relative Balance between inflow and outflow as profoundly true.
The Milky Way glows into vaster view, stretching all the way to Perseus, revealing our position within a spiral arm of a galaxy whose center lies far beyond Sagittarius. I sit, unmoving, part of the night of silently patrolling owls and carefully foraging mice. When sleepiness descends, I pick up my bowl, socks and canteen and walk back to my sleeping bag. Shifting my gaze from the starry sky down to the ground, my night vision eyes dilate even wider, so that the dark ground fills with the dim outlines of sleeping bag and pack. I put my bowl away, brush my teeth, and set my canteen down by my sleeping bag. I slide into the thick insulation of my “heat outflow less than sleeping heat production” sleeping bag and gaze up into deep space, until I tuck my glasses into my shoes and float into sleep.
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