UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Nala Hodjat, Art by Siobhan Henderson

It would be fair to call what I did running away. At the time, I certainly wasn’t thinking of it as such – I wasn’t thinking of anything. St Andrews is only comfortable for so long. Yes, you can see the stars here on clear nights  (and you can see them best from West Sands), but lights from the town and from Dundee turn the fringes of the sky white. They suffocate the constellations and place all of us in an infinitesimal unpoppable bubble. I needed air. It wasn’t night when I left, but the train line from Leuchars to Ayr has three changes and takes four hours. The lights in the train render my window seat useless. You would think Scotland at night is a vast, gaping black maw with how the train’s speed and the reflection in the window obscures the verdant landscape. 

The plan was simple: I was going to go to Ayr, take the train to Dumfries the next day, and then find someone to take me to Galloway Forest Park. There are only two national parks in Scotland, but both cover massive swathes of land. It was half seven at night when I walked Ayr beach and, yes, while the torches at the promenade cast thin shadows over the sand, they could not even begin to touch the void of the sky. I looked up and saw Aquila staring down at me, its beak pointed in a soft, sad sort of way. Have you ever seen a bird confused? They tilt their head as if life makes more sense at a seventy degree angle. I wonder now if Aquila was asking me what I was running from – there’s not much to answer for there. I got a text that night from a friend – 

Why are you in Ayr? 

Is everything okay???? 

I checked it, closed all of my open apps, and shut my phone off. 

– 

Dumfries was a delicate balance of red brick, lush grass, and biting wind that brought a soft ruddiness to my cheeks as soon as I stepped off the bus. The nearest city (large town, really,) to Dumfries is one-hundred and twenty-two kilometers away and that was made obvious in the air’s clarity. I felt as if I could truly breathe! Beautiful as it was, there was no time to waste – I had places to be. It’s a forty-five minute drive from Dumfries to the mouth of Galloway Forest Park. Every bit of green here feels unimaginably old and imbued with something human that I, as a foreigner, can’t completely fathom yet. 

And the sky is still bright, clear, and blue against the trees that threaten to scrape it; the park’s entrance nearest to Dumfries looms over the car I hired. As the sun sets, you can feel everything quiet. I found myself a place by a loch, sat semi-comfortably on a loosely connected collection of rocky stones, and waited. With such little light, you can see into the heart of the Milky Way. The night sky, an unending tapestry of twinkling light, swallows you whole. It struck me for a moment that everywhere used to be like this. Perhaps not as picturesque, but still clear and beautiful in their own right. We took that away from ourselves. 

–

The dark sky initiative, which Galloway Forest Park is a proponent of, is a program meant to preserve and protect natural skies worldwide. It was the first in the United Kingdom to be given a gold star status – and it’s easy to see why. Even with the caravan parks, flashlights, every little thing humans can add to morph it into something it isn’t, is made obsolete. Anthropogenic ‘sky glow’ impacts the sleep-wake cycles of all animals (including humans), as well as migration patterns: as ecosystems are so interconnected, something that seems so small, like a declining bird or insect population, can have a massive impact. You can hear the birds here. So, so clearly, singing these beautiful, ancient songs, and you can feel them flying overhead. There is one, high in the sky, who stares down at me still. Aquila. A new friend. I wonder how many people that winged creature has looked upon. Alone, I am so insignificant. The light from my phone is insignificant. The light from my flashlight is, too. A thousand of me would ruin this place. There is something so, so beautiful about that fragility.