The Dark Sky of Shelton Laurel

The events of two consecutive Friday nights have convened a conversation in my mind that needs to find its way to my keyboard. A week ago we went to the Bare Dark Sky Observatory at the Earth to Sky Park of the Mayland Community College in Burnsville, North Carolina, about a 90-minute drive from our home. The observatory and its associated planetarium house the largest telescope in the Southeastern US dedicated to public use. The park, which occupies the top of a small mountain near Mt. Mitchell, the tallest mountain east of the Rockies, was the first such place in the Southeast designated a “dark sky area” by the International Dark-sky Association.

To get there we crossed one of the many small rivers that ravaged these hillsides in the floods of hurricane Helene in September 2024. The building housing the large and small reflector telescopes is about the size of a large garage and workshop. Accommodations, including a porta-potty, are modest indeed. After our hosts presented a brief review of the history of astronomy (the Egyptians and Babylonians to Steven Hawking!), the roof slid back, exposing the entire night sky, brilliant in the winter darkness. For over an hour we could look at Saturn, Jupiter, the Pleiades, and other star clusters. But the real show was the 360 degree view of the night sky in its overwhelming immensity. The closest star, with, presumably some planets, would take a voyage of 88,000 years. Even as we shivered in the freezing night air, we could feel the awe and reverence for this immense universe experienced by thousands of generations before us.

It is this awe and reverence which our light-polluted sky denies us now. Our demand for security and industrial products eclipses the experience of awe at the heart of religious feeling. I was reminded of a statement by Rev. William Coffin, Chaplain at Yale during my years at Yale Divinity School, passed on to me recently by Ken Sehested, from his website, Prayer and Politiks. “And wonder is not reserved for beauty and acts alone; it has an ethical dimension, it leads to reverence. And what an irony it is that just as technology frees us to be fully human, not mere survivors of the earth’s rigors, but thinking, feeling human beings—how ironic, and savagely so, that soon we may lose the whole planet because we have lost our sense of wonder. For finally only reverence can restrain violence, violence against nature, violence against one another.” 

That sense of planetary unity, of the fragile co-humanity of us tiny creatures struggling for survival in the immensity of an unfathomable universe, was sounded in a different key a week later, in the premier of a new opera, Shelton Laurel, composed by Damon Sink, of Western Carolina University. Shelton Laurel is the site of a massacre of 13 local residents in nearby Madison County by Confederate soldiers in January 1863. It is only a few miles from the observatory in Yancey County. The people in these mountains were torn apart by the Civil War, some of them allying with the defenders of slavery and others supporting the Union and the end of a cruel regime that did not benefit them. Because members of the tiny community of Shelton Laurel had  stolen salt and provisions from the Confederate depot to try to avert starvation in that cold winter, they were tracked down and murdered as suspected Unionist “Lincolnites.” Through music, action, and costume, the performers laid bare the deep tragedy contained in this single event.

Local author Ron Rash has collected reconstructed stories of these still-remembered bloody wounds in the communities of this region. Out of some of these stories emerged this gripping work whose contemporary meaning was not lost on the packed audience. We stand at the brink once again of a regime of violence tearing apart our co-humanity. With minds unfettered by the memories of our bloody past, we lurch into a zombie state repeating what our ancestors suffered so horribly in the battles in these hills. Brother turns against brother, sister against sister, seeing fellow citizens as the very embodiment of evil, staining the streets of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and many other cities with innocent blood. The sky we have obliterated with our headlong pursuit of economic gain cannot lure us back to the awe before a greater God or the immense dignity of every fragile creature around us. The dark sky, like the haunting music of this drama, calls us to keep alive the light of truth that overcomes our own lies and our angry determination to dominate a world that is not ours to rule. It is only in this darkness that we can see the light.