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On the high plains of San Augustine west of Socorro, New Mexico, is a small town named Magdalena. About a half an hour’s drive farther west is a row of telescopes called the Very Large Array.
To the untrained eye the Very Large Array looks like a row of satellite dishes, extending for many miles in a long line across the desert. They can be seen from the highway. The dishes can be moved, so that sometimes they stretch for great distances and sometimes the formation is neatly compressed. Astronomers call them antennas.
The array comprises twenty-seven dish antennas, turned up toward the sky. It is a complex of radio telescopes, devoted to observing the cosmos. Its mission is to collect radio waves from natural celestial bodies vast distances away from earth—waves that are then fashioned by computers into images of these far-off bodies, which include planets, stars, even whole galaxies. There are spiral galaxies like the one in which our solar system dwells, dwarf galaxies, even strangely shaped, distorted galaxies astronomers call peculiar.
Ann and Ben moved onto an abandoned ranch outside Magdalena in the winter of 2003. By that time, in the known universe, the number of stars within telescope range was estimated at seventy sextillion, or seventy thousand million million million.
Ann had learned of this estimate in the late fall, soon after they got home, and begun to comb newspapers and web sites for land for sale near the Very Large Array. She thought if she lived there she would feel the presence of the sextillion.
She found them an isolated place, an old mud-brick ranch house with a stone chimney and tile floors. It sat on a sagebrush ridge overlooking rolling valleys and hills of grass, piñon, cedar, and juniper, and at sunset purple and red clouds spread across the whole sky and nothing could touch them.
Often they looked like they were burning.
It was painful to sell the house and the garden in Santa Fe but she could not stay there. In the city there were too many smug Rogers and too many Sheilas who wanted to relive the old days, too many intimations of quiet power on the sides of trucks that passed the city hurtling down the interstate. In the country house they found a new routine, drinking wine every night as the sun set and they sat on their front porch watching the dark shapes of their low, scrubby trees bending in the wind. They ordered the wine several cases at a time, but they were not immoderate; and in the pantry, waiting to be drunk, the bottles gathered dust.
Ben found work on a nearby national forest, planting trees, thinning brush, and occasionally watching planned burns. He liked the sight of the fires in the dark, all low along the ground.
At first he was an independent contractor to the Forest Service and was surprised to learn that most of his salaried coworkers did not like to work at all. Rather they drove over the old logging roads hour after hour in their government vehicles, looking for ways to waste time. One of them drank cheap beer all day long, driving over the rutted mud with his windows rolled all the way down, red dirt caking his hair, fishing the cans out of a cooler on the passenger seat of his truck as he drove. Whenever he saw Ben he offered him a can, and when Ben did not want it he shook his head with a smirk to let Ben know he did not suffer fools gladly.
But Ben was stubborn and worked hard and though they mocked him at first and even called him a “pretty boy,” soon they dropped the mockery and he thought he might have won their grudging respect. They continued to do nothing themselves beyond driving around and fielding phone calls from their wives and girlfriends, but they allowed him to work without railing against him.
In return, every so often he accepted a warm can of Schlitz in the morning.
As he drove to the forest at dawn, uphill all the way, he often had a view of the peak of South Baldy Mountain ahead, looming at over ten thousand feet. He liked this and he liked the crystalline frost patterns on his windshield and watching them melt softly from the edges as he drove. Within months he had seen mule and whitetail deer, elk, a black bear, a golden eagle, and herds of pronghorn antelope running fast alongside the highway.
After a while Ann went back to work too, cataloguing images of celestial bodies at the Very Large Array. She drove there every morning in their old car with no heater, her fingers and toes growing numb as she listened to the radio.
She loved the pictures of the celestial bodies and would lose herself in concentration. The images were not actual photographs, since no optical telescope could reach as far as the radio telescopes did, but rather false-color images in rainbows of yellow, green, red and violet. Because these images were all she looked at during the day she began to see outer space as the radio telescopes saw it, an infinite blackness punctuated by explosions of spectral color.
She learned about the celestial bodies as she catalogued them, but she never assumed that what she was learning was real. It was a story the astronomers liked to tell and had a singular beauty, and she found the words for the bodies as lovely as the pictures of them. We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty.
There were galactic sources: supernovae, star-forming regions, pulsars, black holes, and planetary nebulae. There were active galactic nuclei, including quasars, radio galaxies, and Seyfert galaxies.
There were also hypernovae, black holes that formed after the death of massive stars.
Once or twice a month Ben searched internet news archives for word of the
