Here:

We went to the lodge – the 40s one, where Bogart might possibly have sat and smoked, not the spooky Overlook one; where the promise of WiFi was not fulfilled. So we played checkers until the lodge closed, then walked back up the road in the dark. Back in the cabin we played UNO, and I lost four out of five. The kid, she can play UNO. She’d be great at Monte Carlo, coolly appraising Le Chiffre. When the game was done and we were settling in for the night I decided to go shoot the exterior with the camcorder’s Nightvision feature; I so rarely get the reason to use it, I figured this was the time. Nothing like scary green reeds to say “Vacation” in the monthly family movie. I walked down to the shore, careful not to topple into the water, because that’s a stupid way to die. People don’t say it at the funeral, but they’re all thinking the same thing: idiot. When I realized that the footage would be interesting only if a pair of eyes stared back at me, I shut off the camera, and looked up. To paraphrase Dave Bowman:

My stars. It’s full of God.

I went back into the cabin, got Gnat out of bed. She held my hand as we walked around to the front; I told her to look down. We got to the middle of the lawn between the cabin and the shore, and laid down and looked up.

She gasped.

It’s so beautiful, she said. We saw the clouds of stars, the bright ones burning a billion years away, the dim pricks in the firmament that probably represented an entire galaxy, or two, and as usual you remember the wise man’s formulation: either we are alone or we are not, and either is astonishing. Although each has its own implications.

We laid in the grass for a few minutes, holding hands, looking up at the stars. Your mind goes through moods quite quickly – they’re pitiless, indifferent; they’re somehow benevolent. They’re remote but tantalizingly close. They overwhelm with their numbers, yet you can ignore them all by studying one, and giving it the full force of your conjecture. A choir of light, a million silent voices, one great chord you cannot begin to imagine – but you’d know it if you heard it.

We went inside, and she read a Spongebob book. I came out to the porch to write.

Even the light of the laptop drives the stars away. It’s amazing: I hold down the brightness key while looking straight ahead, and the Big Dipper emerges in the sky, clearer and bigger than I’ve ever seen before. There has to be a lesson here. Gosh. Now what could that be.