Fireside Books: Fireside Books in Parksville and BookWyrm in Port Alberni offer used books at just $5 or less. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books, and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details are available online. Ask about returning books for a book credit. Two locations, one amazing adventure in browsing.
The Ballad of Peter & Gracie: Peter and his dog Gracie ran through fields so wide, with dreams in their pockets and stars as their guide. Every day's an adventure under the open sky; in their world of stories, time just flies by.
Peter McCully: Peter had never been anywhere quite so dark before. Not scary dark, not the kind of dark that made you want to hide under the covers. This was a different kind altogether: a big, quiet, open dark, the sort that made you feel very small and very safe at the same time. They had driven to Moorecroft Regional Park just after sunset, his mum and dad and Peter, with Gracie curled on the back seat beside him, her chin resting on his knee.
The park sat on the water's edge south of Parksville, and on a clear night in late summer, his dad had promised, the sky above it was something worth staying up late for. It had taken some convincing, though. Peter liked his bedtime routine. Gracie liked it even more. She had a firm opinion that eight-thirty was the correct time to go to sleep, and she wasn't shy about expressing it.
"Just this once," his mum had said. "Some things are worth being a little tired for."
Peter had packed his backpack with his notebook, two blankets, a bag of crackers and Gracie's favourite squeaky toy, Hector the Hedgehog, which Gracie immediately sat on in the car and refused to give back. Now, standing in the meadow above the water with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Peter was very glad he had come.
The sky was full of stars. Not just a few, the way they looked from the backyard in Coombs, where the streetlights washed most of them out. Here, there were thousands, tens of thousands, scattered across the sky like someone had tipped over a jar of salt. They went all the way to the horizon. They went right down to the tree line.
The Strait of Georgia lay dark and flat below the meadow, and the stars reflected faintly on the water, so that for a moment it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the sea began. And stretching across the middle of everything was a soft, hazy band of light that Peter had never seen before, pale and milky and impossibly wide.
"Dad," he whispered, "what is that?"
"That," his dad said, "is the Milky Way."
Peter stared at it for a long time without speaking. Gracie sat beside him, also looking up, though probably for different reasons. Her ears were pricked and her nose was going. Every now and then, a bat flickered past in the dark, and she tracked it with her eyes, but she didn't bark. Even Gracie seemed to understand that this was a place for quiet.
His dad had brought a star chart, a round paper wheel that you could turn to match the season and the hour, and a red-beam torch, the kind that didn't ruin your night vision the way a regular flashlight did. He crouched down beside Peter and held the chart up against the sky.
"The trick," he said, "is to find something you recognize first and then work outward from there. Do you see those three stars in a row, right there?"
Peter found them. Three bright stars, evenly spaced, like buttons going down a shirt.
"That's Orion's Belt," his dad said. "It's part of the constellation Orion, the Hunter. Those three stars are his belt buckle. The bright reddish star up and to the left is his right shoulder, and the bright blue-white one down to the right is his foot."
Peter tried to see the whole shape. He tilted his head one way and then the other. Slowly, very slowly, he began to make out a figure. Two shoulders, a belt, two feet, arms raised.
"I see him," Peter said. "He's huge."
"That reddish star, his shoulder, is called Betelgeuse," his dad said. "It's a red supergiant. Do you know how big? If it were sitting where our sun is, it would swallow Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and reach almost all the way to Jupiter."
Peter's mouth opened.
"And the light from Betelgeuse takes about seven hundred years to reach us," his dad continued. "So when you look at that star tonight, you're seeing light that left it seven hundred years ago, before there were cars, before there was electricity, before anyone had ever heard of Coombs."
"So I'm looking into the past?" Peter asked.
"In a way," his dad said. "Every star you see up there is in the past. The further away it is, the older the light. For some of the faint ones, the light has been travelling for millions of years."
Peter sat down on the blanket his mum had spread on the grass. Gracie immediately climbed onto his lap, which was a lot of dog for one lap, but Peter didn't mind. He put his arms around her and looked up. Millions of years. He tried to imagine what a million years looked like and found that he couldn't. It was like trying to hold the ocean in a cup.
"Does it make you feel small?" his mum asked, settling on the blanket beside him.
Peter thought about it. "A bit," he said, "but not in a bad way. It's so big that it doesn't matter if I'm small. There's room for everything."
His mum put her arm around him. "That's a very good way of looking at it, Peter."
A little while later, his mum appeared with a thermos of hot chocolate and three cups, and they all sat together on the blanket, Peter in the middle, Gracie wedged against his legs, passing the cups around and looking up.
"Tell me another one," Peter said.
His dad swept the red-light flashlight slowly across the sky. "Over there, do you see those five stars in a kind of W shape, low on the horizon, over to the north?"
Peter found them after a moment. "Yes."
"That's Cassiopeia, named after an ancient queen. According to the old Greek story, she boasted that she was more beautiful than the sea nymphs, which did not go over well. So the gods placed her in the sky, where she spins around the North Star for eternity, sometimes right side up, sometimes upside down."
"That seems like a long punishment," Peter said.
"It does," his dad agreed, "though she does get a very good view."
Peter found Cassiopeia again and tried to picture a queen sitting up there, spinning slowly, looking down at Vancouver Island. He hoped she liked it. He thought she probably would.
"Who made up all the stories about the constellations?" Peter asked.
"Lots of different people," his mum said. "Ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Babylonians. Indigenous peoples from all over the world have their own constellation stories, with different shapes, different names and different meanings. The night sky has been a storybook for as long as people have been around to look at it."
Peter thought about that. People thousands of years ago, sitting outside at night, looking up at those same stars, the same Orion, the same Cassiopeia, the same Milky Way, making up stories to explain what they saw, connecting the dots, finding the shapes.
"We're doing the same thing they did," Peter said slowly, "right now."
"Exactly the same thing," his mum said.
Gracie sneezed at a moth and then resumed staring upward with great seriousness.
"What do dogs see when they look at stars?" Peter asked.
"Well, probably not the same shapes we do," his dad said, "but who knows? Maybe she has her own constellations. The Great Biscuit. The Running Squirrel."
Peter laughed, and Gracie's tail thumped once on the blanket, as if she had heard and approved.
His dad pointed out more things as the night went on. The Big Dipper, scooping up nothing. The North Star, Polaris, sitting almost perfectly still while everything else turned slowly around it.
"Why does it stay still?" Peter asked.
"Because it sits almost exactly above the North Pole of the Earth," his dad said. "As our planet spins, everything in the sky appears to rotate around that one fixed point. Sailors used to navigate by it. If you can find Polaris, you can always find north."
"So they used stars instead of maps?"
"Stars were the first maps," his dad said.
Peter liked that idea very much. He looked at Polaris for a long time, steady and constant, not going anywhere, while the rest of the universe wheeled around it.
Gracie had stopped trying to track the bats and had fallen asleep in his lap. Her paws twitched now and then. Peter wondered what she was dreaming about. Chasing something through a meadow, probably, or running on a beach. Gracie's dreams were almost certainly very fast.
"Dad," Peter said, "are there other planets with people on them, looking at their stars?"
His dad was quiet for a moment. "Honestly, we don't know. The universe is so big that a lot of scientists think it would be very strange if we were the only ones, but we haven't found anyone else yet. We're still looking."
"Maybe someone on another planet is looking at our star right now," Peter said, "and they don't know about us either."
"Maybe," his dad said.
Peter considered this for a while. Somewhere out there, a very long way away, some other small creature might be lying on some other kind of blanket, looking up at a star that was really their sun, feeling exactly the way Peter felt right now: small and amazed, and part of something enormous.
He reached down and stroked Gracie's fur, and she sighed in her sleep.
"I'm glad we came," Peter said.
"Me too, bud," his dad said.
On the drive home, Peter's eyes were heavy, but he didn't want to close them. Gracie was a warm weight against his side. Through the car window, the trees moved past, black against a sky that was slightly lighter than black, and here and there between the branches, he caught sight of some stars.
The same stars. They were still there, just behind the trees. They were always there, even when you couldn't see them. The Milky Way stretched above Parksville, above Coombs, above the whole island, above everything.
Peter thought about Betelgeuse and its seven-hundred-year-old light, about Cassiopeia, the queen spinning upside down, and about the North Star that sailors had followed long before anyone had heard of GPS. He thought about the ancient people lying on hillsides and looking up at these exact same stars, making up stories about hunters and queens and great bears. He thought about whoever might be out there on some other world, looking at a star that was really the sun, looking back toward him without knowing it.
"Mum," Peter said quietly, "can we do this every summer?"
His mum looked at him in the rear-view mirror, her eyes warm. "Every summer," she said.
Peter nodded, satisfied. He reached into his backpack, found his notebook and, in the dim light of the car, wrote three words at the top of a new page: The Night Sky. He would write the rest tomorrow, when he remembered everything. There was a lot to remember.
He looked at the stars between the trees one more time and then, without quite meaning to, fell asleep. Gracie was already there ahead of him, dreaming, probably, of very fast things.
The Ballad of Peter & Gracie: Peter and Gracie, the finest of friends, with tales of wonder that never end. In the pages of books or the stars up above, they find their magic in laughter and love.
Fireside Books: Fireside Books in Parksville and BookWyrm in Port Alberni offer used books at just $5 or less. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books, and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details are available online. Ask about returning books for a book credit. Two locations, one amazing adventure in browsing.
