It wasn’t Joe or Hannah. It was the state.

I was speaking at some things in Montana.

Montana is called Big Sky Country because the wide-open spaces make the sky look big. I hope the sky is all right with that.

One day, while canoeing down or up or across the Missouri River, I had the time and opportunity to take a good, long gander at the Montana sky. I had to agree, it was big.

Not long ago, I watched the eclipse of the moon from our yard. It was top-notch. The red of the blood moon charmed me. It was as if I’d found myself in the yogurt-covered almond aisle of a store. I want to howl for joy there, too.

I spent a lot of time staring at the sky that night. It was a beautiful night for an evening. I realized that our sky is pretty big, too. What a discovery. Galileo and me.

Our sky is even larger than the new Vikings stadium.

I’ve seen the northern lights several times during the past 12 months. I took photos and looked at photos that others had taken. If it had been a photo competition, the others would have won in a landslide. But even my crappy photographs presented the marvels and mysteries of the aurora borealis in a pleasing manner.

Some years ago, while I was speaking at a few things in Alaska, I lodged far from any city. I had a roommate. He was a large, bearded man from New York City. He was a french fry short of 300 pounds. The weather was usual for that of our coldest season. My roomie was a psychiatrist working in Alaska to pay off his school loans. He was like Dr. Joel Fleischman in the TV series, “Northern Exposure,” and like Dr. Fleischman, he hated Alaska. I didn’t need to pry his feelings out of my him. He expressed them all too willingly and often. He hated Alaska, and he wanted everyone to know it. He didn’t like the coffee. He missed the coffee from back home, and his brother who was supposed to mail him some of the coffee had not done so because he was a moron. He couldn’t get the New York Times delivered. He couldn’t get any daily newspaper delivered. All he could get was the local weekly paper. He referred to it, derisively, as “the weekly wiper,” claiming it offered only obituaries and the tide tables.

He did much more groaning than grinning.

One morning, at 2:30, I stepped outside to check the skies.

Holy toledo! There were northern lights. They weren’t everywhere, just in the sky, but that was good enough.

I watched them for a bit, and then I began to feel guilty because my roommate was missing out.

I decided to relieve my guilt by waking him and showing him the lights. He pretended to sleep through my pleadings, but finally awoke at a stage best described as well beyond grumpy. I insisted that he had to see the lights, they were even more breathtaking than the time I sneezed so hard that I could see into another dimension.

He staggered outside. He was wearing a parka the size of a parking lot and bedroom slippers that appeared to have eyes on them. We stared at the sky, mesmerized just as man has always been by what is seen there.

I think a bit of his crankiness had just started to wear off when there was a noise in the brush at the edge of the forest.

A cow moose and her teenaged calf came out. The cow could be crankier than my roommate and as bad-tempered as a checkout line jackknife. For whatever reason, the two strolled by without giving us a second look.

We went back inside.

My roomie handed me his card, adverising his profession as a doctor of psychiatry.

“I’m not saying that you need help, but you need help. I think you should start seeing me on a professional basis,” he said. “Three days a week to begin with might help. We can always increase the frequency.”

It is a big sky.

Take a big look.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.