Camping.

After several rounds of discussion in the office, Sōngguǒ (松果) and Gebu finally decided to drive out and camp on Friday night. For some time, whenever they had a free moment, they had talked about it, right up until today. Friday, after all, was the final day of the camping season at quite a few campsites. Once they had chosen a campground, the two invited ZH-san from the office to join them on a trip to Walmart. The standard-issue shopping list: an axe, barbecue forks, fire starter, and a lighter. This was the first time Gebu and Sōngguǒ had gone camping since beginning their PhDs. As they later discovered, it was also the only time during their first year.

It was only one night, so they did not need very much food. Sōngguǒ did not prepare his ingredients according to the ideas of camp cooking in the anime Laid-Back Camp; his approach was closer to the way local Americans prepared theirs. He marinated about a pound of cubed ribeye overnight in pesto, chilli powder, salt, black pepper, and honey. The next day, they would set off as soon as the seminar ended.

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After listening to the routine seminar on Friday afternoon, the two went to the university fitness centre to collect the camping equipment they had reserved for rental: a four-person tent, camping chairs, headlamps, sleeping bags, and ground pads to keep out the cold. They had originally planned to rent sleeping bags suitable for temperatures of around 5 to 10 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, by the time they reached the fitness centre, none of that rating remained in stock. What they ultimately received were sleeping bags suitable for temperatures around zero degrees Celsius. This proved to be an exceedingly fortunate turn of events.

They drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The weather was clear, with only a scattering of clouds. The final rays of sunlight, sifted through Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering, gave the sky a beautiful gradient. Amid this tranquil scene, Sōngguǒ could not help feeling a kind of “place lag” - a term borrowed from Mark Vanhoenacker’s Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, meaning the estrangement brought on by too great a difference between places, the spatial counterpart to jet lag. Only an hour earlier, he had been sitting in a lecture hall with 75 per cent of its seats occupied, listening to a lengthy seminar entirely unrelated to his own research.

It was already dark when the two finally reached the campground. With the help of their headlamps, pitching the tent was not difficult.

It was far too cold!!!

Sōngguǒ did have some experience splitting firewood, for what it was worth, but putting that experience into practice was not so easy. He put on a show of demonstrating it for Gebu, who then gave it a try in a stance that at least ensured he would not chop off his toes. Once the fire was lit, it was time for dinner: the beef marinated in advance, several Italian sausages, and hot dogs made with brioche buns. If only there had been a cup of hot chocolate, the sense of contentment would have risen by another point.

A clear night sky is made for stargazing. Yet even though Sōngguǒ worked in astrophysics, after looking for so long he could identify only a few celestial objects familiar to the general public: Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, the Winter and Summer Triangles, and the only galaxy beyond the Milky Way visible to the naked eye - the Andromeda Galaxy. Sōngguǒ could not name the remaining points of light scattered at random across the sky. But when they appeared alongside those brighter targets, they brought him a strange and marvellous sense of reassurance.

Sōngguǒ’s skill as a photographer could hardly be called exceptional, but he still wished to record the night sky he had seen. (At a moment like this, no matter how low the temperature fell, Sōngguǒ would stubbornly insist: it was not very cold.)

This photograph was also chosen as the background image when the site was built. I wonder whether, by the time you read this, it is still the background of the blog.

Whenever Sōngguǒ gazed at the stars, music composed by Rei Kagaya would begin playing in his mind.

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After that came sleep, waking from the cold, waking from thirst, no longer wanting to sleep at all, getting up, eating McDonald’s, and the journey home.