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The writer Craig Childs is a wanderer and a searcher.

In his books, he throws himself into slot canyons and high plateaus looking for water and ancient ruins and the hidden rhythms of the natural world.

His latest book is a reverie of the night sky. And it's also a field guide to finding that sky in the age of light. In the book, Childs asks us if we remember being stopped cold by a

brilliant night. And he told us about his first time, which he says came without warning.

He was on a camping trip with his mom and a boyfriend. I remember it clearly because he had an older

white Dodge pickup and he put a whole mattress in the back of it. And then when we got to the forest

that afternoon, he took out

the mattress and just plopped it down on the ground and that was going to be our bed. When

night fell, they put a lot of blankets on it and then they put me under the blankets and then they

disappeared.

They could have been 20 feet away.

I was little, but I was afraid of the dark.

And it was dark.

Ponderosa pine forest and no moon, just black, black, dark.

The dark seemed malevolent, or worse, it felt like nothing at all.

No mom out there, no boyfriend, no pickup.

I'd fallen from the well and brightly lit world with my eyes darting for anything to grasp.

You know, what are you afraid of in the dark? Anything, nothing, I was just afraid. And I couldn't move underneath the blankets, so I just lay there frozen with fear.

Then I looked up.

Above me is the ring of the tree canopy,

...