When prompted to consider our favorite place in nature and what it meant to us, I was at once flooded with images and ideas of the lovely scenes and spots I visit and cherish. Above all things in this world, I love the Atlantic Ocean, so it came to mind first. But for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt this was a cop-out.

This summer I went on a 17 day road trip with my boyfriend Sacha (Lafayette ’14). For 14 of the nights we had little more than a general idea (think, state-at best) of where we would be setting up camp, and all in all we drove about 5,500 miles, visited 6 national parks, saw 12 states, and stayed in 14 different locations. It was a wonderful trip full of beauty that I will undoubtedly write about in future blog posts, but to get back to my original intention here, I will write about one night in particular that will stay with me as long as I live as a testament to the majesty of the skies.

Sacha lives in Minnesota, and when I am not at Lafayette, I live in New Hampshire, so we are always a plane ride apart. When it is frustrating or saddening not to be together, one of us will usually remind the other to look up to the sky because despite our distance from each other, we’re looking up at the same stars, the same sun, the same moon. A little cheesy, I know, but it helps.

So one of the nights on our adventure we wound up in Death Valley National Park well beyond the appropriate hour to get one’s tent situated for the night. We got our tent up around 9:30pm whilst baking in the 105 degree temperatures at Furnace Creek Campground, 190 feet below sea level. If this weren’t already wild enough, the desert winds were so strong, they threatened to blow our tiny tent away every time we left it for more than a moment (the ground was too solid to stake it in). We were comically out of place. After a solid effort of maybe five minutes trying to sleep in our tent-oven, we engineered ourselves some more refreshing sleeping quarters by pulling two campground tables together, head to head, and laid under the stars.

The sky that night is unrivaled and unparalleled by any other I’ve ever seen. I cherish the relative visibility of a starry sky in rural New Hampshire, but this felt like another world. The expanse of the black and the clarity of the visually unpolluted stars was so humbling. I have scarcely felt so small. It feels cheap to leave it at this, but it was incredible.

Despite its magnificence, I don’t know that I could consider Death Valley among my favorite places. But that moment, I can. Head to head on that table, Sacha and I looked up at the same sky together, and it was a better place than any I could imagine the next time we look up from afar.

I think the meaning I take from a moment like that is the inspiring massiveness of nature in this country. I have certainly taken for granted my ability to walk in the woods, or play at the beach, or hike a mountain at will when I’m home, but only in these recent experiences have I realized the different levels of nature, and the inspiring beauty of the actual “wild”. I feel compelled to share these experiences with others because I think they are at the core of who we as a social breed should be. Life often moves too fast, and it is the places in nature alone that can truly slow it down.