Late in the spring of 1974, I'd just graduated from college and was soon to leave Colorado, a state I'd loved at first sight when I arrived in 1971. Some friends and I went camping together for the last time, a brief overnighter in one of the Rocky Mountain national forests. Late in the afternoon, it was gray, damp and cold. A friend walked ahead of me on a trail, and as he hiked over a rise, I was mystified to see him disappear into the fog.

Most of us had tents, but my roommate and I didn't. We couldn't find a flat area so we unfurled our sleeping bags on a slope above a valley. We placed stones at the foot of our bags to keep us from sliding downhill. (We were not pros.) The clouds cleared, so it got much colder in the night. That didn't keep me up because my secondhand sleeping bag was warm.

What kept me awake was the sky. The sky was spangled with stars, sprays and swirls of stars and planets in fascinating patterns of light against darkness. Sleepy as I was, I couldn't stand to close my eyes, to miss a moment. The beauty of the laws of the universe had become physically evident. The pace of time seemed to shift, and I got to see the motion of the stars, how they circled around the north star as the night progressed, how it all processed across the sky, how perfect the synchrony of the celestial clock.

The air was cold and very still, sweetly scented of the wilderness. I fell asleep late in the night, but awakened again well before dawn, my body awkwardly wedged against the stones. I saw something very bright in the east over the valley. Venus was rising. I knew of the planets, and had learned from books and classrooms how they traveled, and what our perspective from earth was like. But this was the first time it visually clicked. I watched the path the white fiery planet made the last couple hours of the night, watched it fade as sunrise approached. A couple of days later, I was on board a plane back home to Louisiana; my life in Colorado had come to a close.