The Items We Forget and the Moments We Remember

by Amelia Jarecke (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find USA

At 1:30 a.m., the only thing separating me from the 33-degree air outside was a tent, half of a sleeping bag that didn’t zip, and a beach towel. I desperately wanted to fall asleep again to force the end of the bitterly cold night to come quicker, but my racing thoughts convinced me that if my heart rate slowed any further, I might not ever see the morning sun warm the Yellowstone ground. And it was only our first night in the park. Audrey was wrapped in the other half of the ragged sleeping bag with one of her arms accidentally draped over me. I would have politely pushed her off, but at this point, our slight combination of body heat felt like the difference between life and death. Her steady rhythm of sleeping breath disrupted the deafening silence of the woods, and I didn’t dare wake her up despite my concerns about imminent hypothermia. She had driven most of the way to the park that day and out earned me in sleeping rights 100 to one. At this moment, though, I wished I still found it funny that she mistakenly left her sleeping bag on her kitchen table. When she realized it earlier that evening, I thought we could make do since it was July, but my lighthearted optimism left with all the feeling in my toes. When 2 a.m. finally creeped around, I caved. “Audrey?” I whispered into the dark. “Yeah?” “I can’t do this. Let’s go to the car.” Without speaking, she grabbed her towel, and I wrapped my sleeping bag around me. When she unzipped the tent, our slightly warm breath escaped into the pitch-black outdoors and was overtaken by biting cold. We walked 20 yards to her car in silence and defeat, eyes glued to the ground as to not trip over rocks or fallen branches. I resisted the urge to pull on the locked door handle a hundred times. When we got in, she thrashed her keys into the ignition and blasted the heat. At last we found out exactly what temperature we had braved for hours. Thirty-three, the dashboard read. Thirty-three. Audrey started driving to warm the engine. We pulled out of the campsite and onto the winding main road of the park. Our headlights lit up all that was 10 feet in front of us, and everything beyond that was a mystery. I was intensely grateful, one—for the warmth that the vents were slowly emitting, and two—that I no longer felt like the only person who was awake in the entire park. When our bodies finally thawed, we pulled back into the campsite. After we parked, I re-entered the tundra to retrieve a granola bar from the trunk. In that one glorious moment, I raised my eyes up to the night sky. An unexcavated jewel mine whirled above me. The stars looked how artists paint them, how desktop backgrounds portray them, how they should look. Their radiance was dizzying and captivating, and I didn’t dare look back down and miss a moment of the magic. It didn’t spark the same awe that other natural wonders like mountains or oceans do. It was greater—the Milky Way itself was spilling out around me. That was the first time in my life that I had seen the stars as they naturally occur, unaffected by light pollution. I’d been out in the middle of nowhere before, but apparently never quite far enough to bring outer space into arms reach. What I couldn’t have anticipated then was that it may be a very long time until I get to see the glittering spectacle of the natural sky again. We spent two more nights in Yellowstone, but they both turned out to be cloudy. On the way home, while Audrey and I rehashed our trip, I said, “Maybe the reason we froze that first night was so we could wake up and see the stars.” She replied in all seriousness, “The stars would’ve looked the same if it had been 60 degrees.” I scoffed, but I couldn’t blame her. That was after three nights spent sleeping in a Toyota.