Nightwatch. Patrol on an empty highway--empty of houses, businesses, cars. Highway 90 at 3:30 in the morning and it's nothing but 2-lane road, scrub grass and marsh beyond.

And stars. God, the stars! I stopped my car on the side of the road and turned off the headlights. Put Suzanne Ciani in the CD player. Air so clear and hardly any ambient light this far away from town; the sky had texture. I could see the stars beyond the stars and more beyond those stars. The bright points of light were merely tips of mountains--great heaping piles of stars.

Every few minutes a stray piece of space debris would sear its way across the sky for a split second in red and white.

I got out of the car and just stood in the middle of the highway, head tilted back, starlight on my face and the moon just the thinnest dark-orange crescent still tangled in the trees on the horizon.

I stood there forever. Or maybe it was just as long as I needed to stand there. I found the few constellations I knew, then I made up some new ones. The moon came higher, burnt-orange giving way to milky yellow and taking some of the stars near it away. But only a handful. It couldn't touch the piles of stars in the center of the sky.

I stood there and forgot--for a few minutes--about crashing planes and falling buildings and bombs and war. I stood on that highway and tilted my head back to the sky and drank in the starlight.