The Smallest Lights In The Universe

I can remember he had a friend over for dinner who said that my insides belonged to someone much older, and my father beamed at the idea that my body didn’t match my soul. He believed in reincarnation, and he wondered aloud whether we had known each other in a past life and that explained our connection. He was sure that we would find each other again in the future.

By the time I was eleven, books had become my principal means of connecting to the world, and when the subject of reincarnation came up, I did what I usually did and went to the library to read about the prospect of life after death. I came away from my research understanding that death was final, but my father had exposed me to other possibilities. That’s what fatherhood was to him: His job was to serve as a tour guide to the marvels of human existence. He decided that I was going to be a doctor like him, and he began grooming me for his particular brand of success. He played me soaring classical music and gave me books that were far beyond my reach. I remember he handed me a George Gamow book called One, Two, Three … Infinity. I read it, as instructed. It made zero sense to me.

Another book, a thin red paperback called The Magic of Believing, did make an impression. My father bought a carton of that book and would hand them out to any taker. It was a historical survey of the power of positive thought. I read it over and over again. My favorite part was a story about a girl named Opal, the daughter of a logger in Oregon, who believed that she was French royalty. Most dismissed her as a lunatic, but by her twenties she had become part of a royal family, albeit in India, where she was spotted by a journalist in a magnificent carriage drawn by a team of horses. That book made me believe in a kind of practical magic: that vision begat planning, which begat opportunity. I could will my way to a better life.

My reality remained resistant to change. When I was twelve, my father enrolled me in a private school: St. Clement’s School, for Anglican girls. We were Jewish, in theory if not practice, so I was only a half-fit. It was the only private school that would take me. The entrance exams for all the others had been easy, but the interviews were a different matter. Maybe the schools thought I was too socially unprepared to belong. Looking back, I think the problem was more likely my silence during what was meant to be a conversation. I never knew what to say, so I mostly said nothing.

I entered St. Clement’s in the seventh grade. We were forbidden from leaving school property, but I had been walking the streets of Toronto on my own since I was six. There was a bakery across the street that called out to me, and I wasn’t going to let some stupid rule stop me from going. A few weeks after my arrival, I crossed the street.

That was the equivalent of arson at a school like St. Clement’s, and in a way I did start a fire. Other girls began to question a curriculum that was designed to make us obey. They began cheating in study hall and writing scandalous things on blackboards. (One girl wrote Jesus Loves You, which was considered offensive for reasons I never understood.) The principal saw me as the catalyst for the rebellion, probably because I was. She summoned me to her office more than once. “Sara,” she began each time, “you are very smart, good-looking, and the other students follow your lead. You could put those traits to better use.” Something had changed in me, and I bristled at her judgments. Why should I be the person she thought I should be?

When other parents began forbidding their daughters from talking to me, I realized it was time to change schools. I went back to the public system; within a year or two, I had fully embraced my fate. I fell in with a band of rootless teenagers from schools across the city. Word would go around, and we’d meet up later that night on a random subway platform. None of the kids was my friend, exactly, but two older girls took pity on me and made sure that I came along to parties. They teased me about how I dressed before lending me better clothes, and I trailed behind them like a mascot, trying to figure out how to feel what they felt for each other. (Their teasing was better than the purer tormenting I could suffer at school.) We would pour into sockets of the city like mercury. There was a lot of alcohol. There were a lot of drugs. I might have been my father’s daughter, but only on the weekends. During the week I still lived with my mother and stepfather, and on those five nights I tried to stay far out of sight.

*

In the late winter and spring of 1987, when I was fifteen years old, a new star appeared in the southern sky. A blue supergiant named Sanduleak -69° 202 had exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a small satellite galaxy next to the Milky Way. It was the closest supernova in nearly four hundred years, the first opportunity for modern astronomers to witness firsthand the death of one star and the birth of another. It was 168,000 light-years from Earth, but you didn’t need a telescope to see it: From its February discovery through the peak of its brightness in May, the last of its light hung in the sky. It was only after the light disappeared that astronomers were able to confirm that Sanduleak -69° 202 was the lost star.

One Sunday afternoon, I was supposed to go skating with some girls from my school. I bailed and went instead to a presentation about the new supernova at the University of Toronto. Among a panel of men in suits, one man was conspicuously in jeans. He turned out to be the astronomer who had discovered Supernova 1987A and its halo-like light. Two thousand people, seated in rows radiating out from the stage, listened to him speak. I sat enthralled in the pin-drop quiet, ravished by an amazing tale of discovery. The sense of wonder that had overwhelmed me in Bon Echo was reignited. All it took was the self-destruction of a star.

Later that summer I turned sixteen. I stopped running with my crowd of teenagers. We were on a ferry to the Toronto Islands, trying to kill another boring, endless night, when I saw the lights of a boat going the other way and realized that I wanted to be on it, not the one I was on. I got a job working a carnival game at the Canadian National Exhibition, the game with the impossible-to-catch plastic fish. After three weeks in the crowds and the heat, I’d made the vast sum of $400. I spent every penny of it on a four-inch reflecting telescope.

I kept the telescope at my father’s place. I spent chilly weekends the following winter standing in a sprawling parking lot, looking up at the stars. My father often stood shivering beside me, our breath turning into a single cloud in the cold.

I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

*

Back on Earth, my father decided to embark on a second career: He began offering hair transplants. Despite his success in internal medicine, he enjoyed the feeling of starting again, pouring the foundation for another slow build. I thought there was something bittersweet about his new work. He wasn’t saving anybody’s life by giving them hair again, but his new patients became some of his most faithful admirers. They had endured years of stress and insecurity, the pain of an inevitable, undesired conclusion, and here was a man who promised to restore everything that they had lost along with their hair.

Early hair restoration was barbaric. Desperate men submitted to having hundreds of plugs cut out of sections of their scalps. The surgeries could leave them more damaged and vulnerable than they were before, the cure worse than the disease. Something called “shotgun scarring” was a common side effect. My father wanted better, and he was obsessive about improving his technique, making his trademark thousands of more realistic-looking, single-follicle grafts. He experimented with every promised advance—he was among the first to use lasers before he rejected them for scorching what they were meant to sow—and he never seemed satisfied with even the best labors of his practiced hands. A reasonable-seeming hairline doesn’t seem like it should be the most elusive goal in the world, but nothing defies mimicry like nature, and my father’s devotion to his practice and patients had its impact on me. It was the most accidental yet meaningful of his illustrations. There was something inspiring about his refusal to accept the present as a forever reality.

After brief stops at other schools, I finally landed at Jarvis Collegiate Institute, a public high school near the heart of the city with an excellent reputation for math and science. It was diverse in every sense, filled with immigrants from all over the world, a dizzying collection of sophisticates and loiterers, geniuses and stragglers. Jarvis Collegiate was the perfect school in which to be a loner. There was no pressure to belong, because nobody there could agree on what it meant to be cool. I didn’t feel the relief of connection. I felt the relief that comes with not having to worry about finding connection anymore.

I was walking to school one day, by myself as usual—cutting across the divided campus of the University of Toronto, the old half made of stone, the new half made of glass—when I saw a sign for a school-wide open house that weekend. On Saturday, I returned and found the elevator in the tallest building on campus and pressed the button for one of the upper floors. I stepped out into the astronomy department. There was a table staffed by professors and students handing out small piles of paper, and it struck me in an instant: Astronomy could be more than a passion; it could be a career. I made up my mind to commit myself to my schoolwork. Good grades would get me into university, which would allow me to look at the stars for the rest of my life. Magic.

Most subjects proved easy for me—with the notable exception, initially, of physics. It was hard for me to apply its equations to the real world; life seemed more random and chaotic than that. My life did, at least. Then one day my physics teacher gave us each a small coiled spring. On the other side of the classroom, he set up a board with a hole cut into it. The object of the exercise was for us to calculate the spring’s force constant, and to use Hooke’s law and the equations of motion to find the perfect angle at which to launch the spring across the room and through the hole.

One by one, we made our attempts. Maybe a third of the students found the mark. (I have my suspicions about how many of them had followed Hooke’s law and how many were just lucky.) I did the math, checking and double-checking it before it was finally my turn. I angled my spring and fired. My mouth fell open while I watched the spring arc perfectly across the room, straight through the hole.

*

At the start of my last year of high school, I was surprised to be handed three envelopes along with my class schedule. I opened the first to find a letter that said I’d earned the top marks in my entire grade the previous year, finishing first out of three hundred or so students. The other two were subject awards. I didn’t even know our school gave out academic awards—I’d never received one, and I’d always skipped the assembly when they were presented. A couple of days later we gathered in the school auditorium. I was in the school band and we played before the awards were presented. Each time my name was called, I had to put down my flute and walk across the stage. I felt awkward, maybe even embarrassed, as a small pile of certificates soon joined my sheet music.

One of my former party friends, now a stranger to me, came up to me afterward in the hall.

“I didn’t know you were so smart,” he said. I can still hear the way he said it, with a weird mix of anger and smugness and confusion. He had wanted to be my boyfriend at some point, but I didn’t feel that way about him. Maybe he saw his chance to reject me back.

“Neither did I.”

I suppose I should have been happy or proud of my achievement, but I wasn’t especially. I looked at it with logic: In the subjects in which I had achieved the highest grades, I won the awards. That made sense. What made less sense to me was that I had made the highest grades the first time I tried to earn them. I hadn’t been relentless or anything like single-minded. I had simply decided to work harder. The math didn’t add up. It should have been tougher to be the best.

My father was happier than I was, until I told him one more time that I didn’t want to be a doctor. Since the open house, I had insisted to him that I was going to be an astronomer. He gave me a harsh lecture during my next visit. It was one of our few weekends together that felt too long rather than too short.

“You have to get a job and support yourself,” he said. “And. Not. Rely. On. Any. Man.” My father’s resistance to my ambitions struck me as ironic. A psychic had once told him that he’d be a household name, and by the early 1990s he had earned an unlikely fame for his own unconventional path: The Seager Hair Transplant Centre and its ubiquitous billboards still celebrate him more than a decade after his death. He credited no small part of his achievements to The Magic of Believing. But when it came to his daughter’s future, he wasn’t quite so willing to challenge the Fates.

Nobody made a success of themselves by trading in abstraction, he scolded. “The world wants evidence,” he said, nearly shouting. “The world wants proof.” I heard him, but I didn’t listen. Jupiter had already made its greater case.

*

There’s a famous play, Equus, about a troubled boy with a blinding love of horses. The boy sees a psychiatrist named Martin Dysart, who tries to understand him by trying to understand his love. Dysart is confounded by it:

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all—just those particular moments of experience and no others—I don’t know.

I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters. Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own. Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers.

But there’s more to my love than that. When I think of the stars I feel an almost physical pull. I don’t just want to look at them. I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth. I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone. Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me—but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new.

CHAPTER 2

A Change of Course

There were thousands of miles between us and the top of the world, and I hadn’t seen a single inch of them. Every step ahead of us would be pure discovery. I felt a charge run through my entire body: the electric thrill of the unknown. Up there, I knew nothing.

According to the boundaries on our still-crisp map, we were in northern Saskatchewan. Now those lines seemed meaningless to me, a futile attempt to impose order in the absence of anything human-scale. Saskatchewan is a giant rectangle on paper, but we were in a place that defied such conventional geometry. There were no landmarks, no crossroads, none of the usual signs or sharp corners that we use to find our way. There were only rocks, trees, and rivers, stretched out in a tangle as infinite-seeming as time.

It was June 1994. I’d just finished my bachelor’s degree in math and physics at the University of Toronto. The past two summers, I’d interned at the David Dunlap Observatory not far outside the city, dividing my time between observing and classifying variable stars—stars whose brightness varies—and reading the leather-bound astronomy books that I pulled from the ladder-tall shelves. I’d also been drawn more deeply into the wilderness, taking canoe trips under the canopy of lights I’d first seen at Bon Echo. I decided to take a long break before I waded into my graduate work at Harvard and devote it to the trip of a lifetime: two months in a canoe in Canada’s remote northern reaches, beyond the last of the trees.

The focus and discipline of university had erased the last vestiges of my vagabond adolescence, but I remained restless, given to fits of mental and physical wandering. I was never satisfied with the world in front of me. There always had to be more. Once again a book changed the course of my life: Sleeping Island, written by a man who left his schoolteacher life in Boston one summer to explore the great Barren Lands by canoe. It set me dreaming about an epic traverse. I spent my last undergrad winter in the library, poring over maps and accounts of century-old expeditions written by the low light of lanterns. Even in sepia, the Arctic was an otherworldly landscape, made up of nearly as much water as earth. In the north in summer, under the glare of a midnight sun, there could seem to be more lakes than stars.

I joined the Wilderness Canoe Association in Toronto to prepare for my own journey. One weekend I needed a ride to a backcountry ski trip (organized while we waited for the rivers to thaw), and a club member named Mike Wevrick offered me a lift. When I arrived—late—for our rendezvous, I found him in his beat-up car reading a slightly less-worn paperback. Between his book, his beard, and his mop of ginger hair, I couldn’t see much of his face. His eyes were his only defining feature, the same blue as the winter sky.

We spent five hours in the car together, bound for Killarney Provincial Park near Sudbury, Ontario, where we skied with a group through the forest, the trees clinging like mountain goats to the steep terrain. Mike said that he was impressed with my skiing. I wasn’t impressed with his, especially when he decided to end the day early and grab a donut from a nearby Tim Hortons. I wanted to ski until dark.

Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him. He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month. I rejected him exactly as often. I thought I understood what he saw in me—I really was a pretty good skier—and maybe a little of what he saw in us. We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both loved the outdoors. That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together? The truth was, the highest register on my human-companionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didn’t bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason.

I had felt a tiny spark with Mike, but nothing like the lightning strikes you see in movies. Was a tiny spark a good enough reason to let him in? I didn’t think so. Besides, I’d be leaving Toronto at the end of the summer. Harvard’s Department of Astronomy had accepted me into its graduate program the day we’d gone skiing at Killarney. There was no point in starting something that would end before it had a chance to begin.

“Do you want to go skiing again?”

“No, thank you.”

“Do you want to go hiking in the White Mountains?”

“No. But don’t take it personally. I’m leaving in September and I’ll be closer to the White Mountains anyway.”

Then one day in March, Mike called with word that the ice had broken on the Humber River: “Do you want to jump in a canoe?” The Humber ran through the city and wasn’t especially picturesque, but I loved paddling more than anything. Mike finally heard me say yes, even if it was the water I wanted, not him.

The following weekend saw us pushing into a set of artificial rapids—the spill from a dam—and we began rehearsing white-water maneuvers. We were out of practice and sync, and within a few minutes we had capsized Mike’s canoe, a battered Old Town Tripper. I’d worn a wetsuit, but I was still cold and wet and not all that happy with Mike. It wasn’t until later, back at his house for a warm-up, that I fully realized he’d shaved off his beard and trimmed his hair into a crew cut. He looked better cleaned up. He’d also stripped off his wetsuit down to the pair of tiny shorts he’d worn underneath. His muscles rippled like the water we had paddled. Wow, I thought. He’s cute. I wondered whether starting something wasn’t such a bad idea.

We paddled together a lot that spring. We began to click in inexpressible ways and started our reasonable facsimile of dating. Even though he was my version of a boyfriend, I preferred to call him my canoe partner. I was thrilled to find someone with whom I could share a boat. Every one of our dates included time on the water, and we built a quiet understanding. Our talks meandered between sets of rapids like the river itself, and our paddling filled the silences. Mike was an editor who worked with words the way I studied light. We both spent a lot of time inside our own heads, trying to bend elusive things into shape. We found that we could be alone together.

I told Mike about my ambitious travel plans for that summer. Like most of my plans, they didn’t include company. But I knew that he would see what I saw in my dreams: wild rivers, untouched forests, the abandoned Old North Trail tapering into the blankest possible canvas. My imagination had become a storybook, the title of each chapter the name of another lake: Kasba, Ennadai, Angikuni, Nowleye, Casimir, Mallet. Their Native and Inuit names sounded so exotic to my ears. Over the course of the next few weeks, Mike hinted that he wanted to join me in exploring them. The more I thought about it, the more I had to make an important concession to reality: It was a little crazy for me to think I could tackle the trip on my own. Mike would make an ideal partner, in more ways than one. I said okay. Why don’t you join me?

One night, we took a break from preparing for our adventure to go for a walk in a heavy rain. Mike held a black umbrella over both of us. On that pitch-black night, over the sound of the rain pouring off the roof that he’d made above our heads, Mike made up his mind to speak. “I’ve never been this comfortable with someone before,” he said. I don’t remember if I agreed out loud, but inside I nodded. I was still learning how to navigate my widening emotions, and I marveled at myself for a few minutes. I was charged with excitement, eager about everything that was ahead of us, whatever everything might be. I had never felt that way before. It was like finding out that your heart could do something new.

*

The itch to go north had been mine but the canoe was Mike’s, his Old Town Tripper. After launching into the relative calm of a river, we paddled into our first of those alien lakes, an inland sea called Wollaston. Looking across its numbing expanse, I wondered how I had ever thought that I might make such a trip alone.

After crossing Wollaston, we spent the first two weeks of our trip mostly river-bound. We shot terrifying, thumping rapids. It often felt as though we weren’t choosing where to go; the rivers almost always made our decisions for us. They were swollen with melt, and we were sucked into rapids that were well beyond my expertise. You have to be careful traveling in a single boat in such a lonely region. You can scream as loud as you want and no one will hear you, and if you lose your canoe, the chances are good that you’ll be lost with it.

There were often rapids too big for us to run. I liked watching Mike in those moments, surveying the steam of the river ahead of us. I admired the calmness of his decision-making. We’d pull up to the bank and begin hauling our canoe and hundreds of pounds of gear on our backs. It felt as though we were traveling in the truest sense. We earned the ground that we covered. Northern Saskatchewan overwhelmed us with its rough-hewn beauty, its eskers covered in white spruce and the bleached remains of ancient travelers: fire rings and tin cans, old boots and caribou bones almost silver in the sun. We never saw another living soul, unless you believe that blackflies have souls, in which case we saw millions of them.