Night Thoughts ( SSA, Children Choir)

It was a clear, still, moonless, beautiful night.  

"Look how the floor of Heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."

We were deep in Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park, a dozen Boy Scouts and six adult leaders, of which I was one, aged 39.  After two days of hard paddling from the last outpost of civilization, we set up our base camp on the far edge of McIntosh Lake.

The stars!  Oh! the stars!  Dazzling.  Breathtaking.

One night, after the last story had been told round the campfire, one of the scouts and I pushed off in a canoe and didn't stop paddling until we were in the middle of the lake.  We lay in the bottom of the canoe, heads on opposite ends, pillowed on our lifejackets, our booted feet propped on the thwarts, our gazes upward.  

All we could see, beyond the gunnels of our canoe, were the stars:  tiny, bright, golden punctures in the inky-black cloak of space, the Milky Way a faint wash of gray.  Now and again a meteor streaked across the sky.  Half a mile from shore, we spoke in hushed tones, almost in whispers.  A Scout is reverent.  It was a time for reverence.

Finally, growing sleepy, we sat up, and discovered that the calm surface of the lake was reflecting stars with such brightness and clarity that we seemed to be floating in space, with stars above us and stars beneath us.  We felt like astronauts.  

Paddles in hand, we scanned the dark, distant shoreline for our campfire ... and found, to our great surprise, that the light of our campfire was nowhere to be seen.  

We had not the slightest idea which direction would lead us back to our campsite, the only occupied campsite, that night, on this large wilderness lake.  We had not thought to ask the others to keep the fire burning for our sake.  We had not thought to note the position of the North Star when we set out.  That  would have been smart.  Eagle Scouts, we ought to have known better.  We had given no thought to the small matter of exactly how we were going to find our way back to the campsite.  If we had, I guess we would have counted on the orange lick of the campfire to serve as our target.  But no.  Off we'd gone.  Out and back.  Simple.

It began to seem that we were destined to be out on that lake all night.  And a very long night it would be.

With a sigh, we chose a direction at random and paddled toward the fringe of pines, the lake's eye-lashes, just a shade darker than the sky.  At length, drawing near the shore, we shouted as loudly as we could.  Silence.  We had no idea whether to paddle left or right.  If we made the wrong turn, there would be many miles of shoreline between us and our campsite.

Well, we chose a direction, I forget which, and paddled on through the wee hours, pausing every ten or fifteen minutes to shout.  

Silence was the only response ... until ... finally ... at long last ... at maybe 2am ... we heard a very distant, muffled shout in reply.  One of the other leaders had gotten up to visit the latrine and heard our shout as he was returning to his tent.  I never welcomed a mere sound with such heartfelt gratitude!  Such a lovely sound!  More beautiful than mere music could ever be!

Twenty minutes more and we were in our tents, snoring in our sleeping bags.  It was all good.  We'd had an adventure, we'd learned an important lesson and, best of all, we'd gotten a good, long look at a sight unknown to city dwellers.  The stars!

Some of what we felt as we looked up from the bottom of our canoe is expressed in an ethereal scene in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Will O’ the Mill.  Two friends stand in a garden at night, starstruck with feelings of awe, humility and wistful resignation.  As I read the passage, I remembered that night in Canada and began to imagine the words sung by a women’s chorus. This week's piece, “Night Thoughts,” is the result.  

Some years later, when our daughter, Shenandoah, was a 7th-grader at Cincinnati's celebrated School for the Creative and Performing Arts, Choral Director Laurie Wyant led the SCPA Children's Choir in a fine performance.  She chose a satisfyingly fast tempo and I love how clearly the child choristers articulate the words!  

To hear that performance, click here:

http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/night_thoughts.mp3

To see a PDF of the score, click here:

http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/night_thoughts.pdf