VISIT MINNESOTA MONTHLY ON THE WEB

Arts and Entertainment

Dining Around Town

Twin Cities Taste

Online Article Index

WE HAVEN'T PASSED EVEN ONE CAR, and most farmhouses are dark at this hour. Still, my heart pounds—anticipating—as we pull off the road into a field of stubbly corn stalks. "OK, park over there," my boyfriend says, directing me to a spot near a boulder autographed by some locals calling themselves the "Brew Crew." "And don't draw too much attention to us."

"If we ever rob a bank, you're driving the getaway car," I grumble, killing the engine and shutting off the headlights. We grab our blanket, a flashlight, and a compass, then tromp across wet crabgrass and choose our spot, scaring a fox with sparkling black eyes along the way.

There is no snow this winter night—it's as warm as late fall. And we, like romantics and explorers for centuries before us, plan to stargaze.

The idea of sitting under a midnight country sky, looking up at the stars (and now and then into each other's eyes), has been part of my definition of romance since I read my first "bodice ripper" novel in junior high. Tonight, I'm going to stargaze. There'll be kisses, too. But in between I'd like a few facts—about how constellations like Cassiopeia and Andromeda came to be, how to tell stars from planets, and how to spot Venus, the brightest, and Mars, which is reddish.

The skies are clear, the roads are quiet, and it's going to be as romantic as my books. If Nicolaus Copernicus could lay the foundations of modern astronomy with nothing more than his naked eye and a clear night, then certainly two reasonably well-educated adults who grew up in the Midwest, able to see stars most any night of the year, can manage to identify the constellations. Especially on this, a cloudless winter evening, with the help and guidance of the handy "Peterson First Guide to Astronomy."

We lounge back on a blanket. My breath fogs the compass, and my boyfriend discovers it's difficult to hold the book and flashlight with gloves. But we manage, and after our eyes adjust to the darkness of this place away from the city lights, we begin to see patterns emerge. We lean against the car's bumper, warming each other's hands and staring at the sequined sky. I glance over. My boyfriend is intent on the night. Occasionally, he turns another page in the book and gazes up again. To the unscientific, he seems to be identifying constellations. But I know what's really going on—his crinkled eyebrows and silence give him away. Like me, he can't even find the North Star or the Milky Way. A few minutes pass and we admit to each other that we are unable to spot the Big Dipper.

Or even the little one.

"I think I see a kite," he says, finally.

I look up. There it is. Clear as day. Right in the middle. "That's got to be something," I agree. "Look in the book."

We scour the book for kite shapes. Peterson doesn't mention this one. But since we both spotted it, we are fairly certain it should be in the book. Surely it is some constellation. While I'm still frantically flipping through the pages, looking for any kite shapes, he shows me another cluster of somethings. Examining diagrams of the northern sky, I find it and proudly identify it as "Northern Coalsack." My boyfriend disagrees, turns the page, and says we're looking at the southern sky. Even with the compass, we can't decide what sky we are sitting under. I show him the part at the top of the page where it says that version of the southern sky comes in summer—he says we don't need the book anymore. We still can't find the darn Big Dipper.

By now, our bottoms are numb from the cold, hard ground, so we stand up and shake grass and dirt off the blanket. The flashlight is fading, and as astronomers we've failed. But as we climb in the car, I point out the "Big Kite" in the sky to him again as we drive out of the field and around a corner.

We still don't agree on how things happened. My boyfriend recalls a different version—one where we conquered the stars and he showed me Orion's belt. As he tells it, the flashlight was the reason his eyes never adjusted. In my version of our night in the country, we tried and we learned—that night, we were scientists, explorers. We saw a shooting star and even made up and named our own constellations. Charting the cosmos was never the point: I didn't want to stargaze with a romance novel hero or an astronomy professor. As we looked deep into that sparkling night, we couldn't stop talking about the stars. I felt connected to stargazers and romantics throughout history—but I knew that night was ours alone.

Now and then, when the sky is that same clear black and the night is warm, we pull the Peterson guide out of his backpack and sit outside on that same blanket, looking up. MM

Sarah Tieck is editorial assistant of Minnesota Monthly.