Eight Billion Stars

Can you see them?

The trunk of my car was packed with all my stuff — almost everything I owned. It was the mid-1970s and I was driving from Lubbock, Texas where I had been attending college to El Paso, Texas where I had been living before I went to college. I was finished with the place I was coming from but I was also finished (in my mind) with the place where I was headed. What I needed was a new destination.

I had not officially done it yet but I knew I was dropping out of college. I had not officially done it yet but I knew that I desperately needed to leave forever my hometown. My destiny was somewhere else and I was not sure where that was.

I left Lubbock in the late afternoon and after crossing the southeastern corner of New Mexico I re-entered Texas after dark. While I was looking for an unknown future destination, that evening I was headed for a specific destination — just for an hour or so.

I had been there before. I was looking for a certain experience. There are several places across the country where one can have such an experience and I have found several of them. This was the first such place I discovered.

The highway between Carlsbad, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas is a long, long lonely drive through land without almost no evidence of humankind. There are no towns. If you ever…