The decisive moment

I’ve never seen the Milky Way so bright, so truly a white pooling in the sky. It’s ten p.m. in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and I'm clustered in a constellation of other stargazers around a single telescope, walled-in by night-painted grass and grey adobe. I sip my hot chocolate, take my boyfriend’s hand, and turn to hear the guide announce:

“The first lunar landing was fake, you know. The Americans faked it. Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon.”

I can actually feel my eyes widen. I glance at my fellow stargazers. Everyone is frozen with different stares, head cocked awkwardly, or mouth slightly open, like fish that have just been caught. He continues:

“In fact, there are settlements on the moon and Mars, you know. NASA, the US government, edited them out of the images they put online. But I can show you.”

The spell breaks, and I turn to my boyfriend, angry. “This is ridiculous. I can’t believe we have to listen to this for the next hour and a half. We should get our money back.”

As I take my brief turn glancing through the single pair of binoculars, I continue to seethe: of course Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and there are no settlements there, and definitely not on Mars. Also, there was supposed to be a maximum of 15 people on the tour, and this looks like 25, and we were promised a Chilean astronomer and University of California astrophysicist as guides; who is this amateur, anyway? I scan the heavens and mentally write a poor TripAdvisor review.

But a few minutes later, I’m looking through the telescope at the rings of Saturn: distinct, glowing white disks. Next I see Omega Centauri, a cluster of 10 million stars that looks like a cosmic snowball radiating cosmic snowflakes, and I understand why the skies have made people dream for centuries. For a moment I fight awe, remembering everything that has gone wrong tonight.

Then I give in. I remember that I’ve promised myself to accept epiphanies from wherever they may come. I remember that travel is not about collecting perfect experiences, but about taking what you can from every place, even a bad memory, or a confusing one, or hopefully, a small beautiful one. I remember that if someone holds out a glowing cluster of stars, you’d better take it, because you are small, and Earth is small, and you won’t live for light-years, only stars do.