On The Road with Mike Drew: By the light of a silvery moon & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

Article content

There were a lot of bugs around.

Article content

Mayflies, mostly, moths, a few water beetles. A mosquito or two. They were crawling over the windshield of the truck, hanging from the headliner, wandering along my arms, getting tangled in my hair. A couple of them lit on the bright rear screen of my camera.

Most of them, I ignored. The ones on the camera, I shooed away.

I’d set up my camp lantern on a picnic table beside McGregor Lake out by Milo to add a bit of light to the scene I had in front of me. It was getting close to 11:30 at night and while the moon was bright and yellow, it wasn’t quite bright enough to light the trees around me so I hauled out the lantern and fired it up.

With it tilted upward toward the trees, I adjust the brightness so I could more or less match the moonlight while still being able to see the stars in the sky above. It took a few minutes of jigging around but I finally got it where I wanted it and got set to shoot some pictures.

Article content

The bugs arrived pretty much immediately.

When I’d left town a few hours before, the day had been hot and windy but as I headed eastward it edged off a bit. It still rattled the wheat in the fields by Carseland and sent ripples across the tall corn over by Mossleigh but as I rolled through the farmland in the lovely evening light it slowly backed down. By the time I found an owl perched in the window of a granary west off Milo, it was nearly slow enough to be a breeze.

Man, the crops look good out this way. Back a couple of months ago when drought seemed a sure thing I never would have guessed that they would end up this way. But the June monsoon came through and things started to grow. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the quality of the crops is any good.

Article content

They look fine but as a farmer once told me, Mike, I’m in the business of growing grain, not straw. Tall crops don’t always mean good crops. But I’m pretty sure that this year, they just might.

I wasn’t necessarily headed out this way to look at the crops, though. I was coming out more for the moon.

A week ago, coming back from the Writing-On-Stone Rodeo, I really enjoyed driving along in the dark and stopping here and there to just look up at the stars as the waxing moon rode the horizon to the west. At one of those stops, by Nanton, I’d set up on a bridge over Mosquito Creek and made a couple of long exposures of the Milky Way and when I got home and looked at them on my laptop, I thought, yeah, that looks pretty cool.

But they would have looked even better with moonlight filling in a bit of the darkness so I watched the weather forecast for clear night skies as the moon grew in brightness and on Monday, it all seemed to come together. Clear sky, nearly full moon.

Article content

So right around supper time, I headed east.

McGregor Lake runs mostly in a north/south direction, long and narrow and surrounded by prairie. No mountains to block the view out here. And it is far enough away from any man-made light sources that once the sun went down the sky would be dark enough to show off even the dimmest stars. True, the town of Milo is close by, but the few lights along the well-kept streets wouldn’t really make any difference.

So I timed my drive through the farmland to get there as the sun was setting. I passed mule deer in the fields, bucks with their velvety antlers, does with flanks nearly the same tones as the ripening grain. Back by Arrowwood there were geese flying out to fields that had already been harvested and here closer to Milo, butterflies clinging to weeds along the edges of a field while grasshoppers bounced along the ditches.

Article content

The moon had already risen around 8 p.m. and it was almost straight up nine o’clock when the sun lit up the beards on a field of wheat and then dipped below the western horizon. The silver sides of the old Alberta Wheat Pool elevator at Milo caught the last of its glow while the moon, now high in the sky, skated along the line where the pinkness of dusk faded into the deepening blue of night.

I scouted along the shore of the lake looking for an angle to reflect the moonlight and — hopefully — the Milky Way but the breeze, though diminished, was still strong enough to kick up waves that would kill any reflection. Looking back toward the horizon from the eastern shore, it still looked lovely, the afterglow of the sunset an intense red and orange while the waves picked up the deep blue of the sky above. But it wasn’t going to work for what I had in mind.

Article content

So I headed back to Milo. There are a couple of places near there where roads go close to the water so I checked them out. And that’s where I noticed the colour of the moon.

It had been silvery earlier in the evening but as the sky grew darker, the moon took on kind of an orange glow. It didn’t look bad. In fact, it looked pretty interesting. But it wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

It was also lower in the sky than I thought it would be and under it, lying on the southern horizon, there was a kind of brownish layer. A thin layer of forest fire smoke wafting in from the west? Must be.

By 11 p.m. the stars were bright in the sky above and I was over at the provincial boat launch on the northwest corner of the lake. The breeze had dropped considerably and the bays over here were almost flat calm. The moon was bright enough to light the trees along the shoreline and the stars above were bright pinpricks in a bowl of deep, deep blue.

Article content

Yep, things were working out just as I’d hoped but it would be another couple of hours before the Milky Way would move into position so I decided to play with the moonlight to while away a bit of time. There was a picnic table close by that sat between a tall, dead tree on one side and a live one that would have provided a bit of shade during the daytime on the other.

So I parked there and got out my light.

I knew as I was setting it up that it would attract a lot of night-flying insects but I was truly surprised by the sheer numbers of them. The first ones arrived within a couple of minutes of me turning on the light but by the time I got it sorted out, there were hundreds of them.

I moved around the setup shooting pictures as I went, trying some with the trees lit from below, a couple from the side, but though they looked okay, they weren’t quite what I had in mind. But when I went back to the table to move the light again, I saw something way more interesting.

Article content

Looking across the light beam, I could see the bugs flying in and swirling around, streaks of fluttering white lit from below that stood out boldly against the dark sky around the yellow moon behind them.

So I pulled the truck up close to the table, clamped my camera to the side window — too lazy to set up a tripod — and fired away at the bugs. Looked pretty cool.

The bugs continued to dance even as the battery in the lamp started to die down but I finally shut it off and went to look for other things to shoot by moonlight. Rolling along past the little campground — mostly unoccupied — I turned onto the dam that runs across the north end of the lake and parked to watch the moonlight shimmer on the water.

The wind had all but stopped now and the water was glassy. Yellow, almost golden light sparkled on tiny wavelets and ran along the triangle wakes behind night-swimming birds. There was rustling in the grass beside the road as a jackrabbit, oblivious to my presence, came out onto the gravel and casually bounced away. It was mostly just a dark blob but the moonlight caught the white fur on its haunches and tail.

Article content

And then, at literally the stroke of midnight, the coyotes started to sing.

Yips, yowls, barks, the cacophonous chorus of the coyote chorale echoed across the water, rising and falling for a full minute before trailing off. And then, almost complete silence.

A few bugs buzzed around and somewhere out in the darkness a bird squawked but beyond that, nothing.

I could have just sat there in the truck and fallen asleep but I didn’t want to do that so I drove along the dam and watched the moonlight on the water until I came to the edge of the bay at its base. Grass along the shore was silhouetted against the golden glow of the moonlight on the water while water bugs skittered along the surface and left bright, streaking wakes as they swam. Further out, something bigger was swimming and a series of bright, moonlit arcs marched across the otherwise calm surface.

Article content

But the moonlight seemed to be getting dimmer and when I looked up, I could see why. Long fingers of cloud were reaching for that golden orb and within a few minutes they’d grabbed it. Deep blue, starry sky remained to the east but to the west, all was tarpaper black.

Cursing Environment Canada — partly cloudy, my butt! — I watched as the clouds rolled in a covered the sky. McGregor Lake still lay calm beneath the cover but all the golden reflections were gone, the bankside grass just a dark mass, the skittering bugs invisible in the thickening dark.

It was now getting close to 1:30 in the morning and the Milky Way, the sight I had come here to see, was rising unseen into the cloud-cluttered night sky. The moon was gone, the clouds so thick that not even its bright, smoky glow could penetrate.

Article content

Leaving the lake behind, I headed for higher ground so I could look around, maybe find a breach in the cover. To the south there seemed to be a bit of brightness but it was a long ways off and the clouds were still creeping eastward. Chances were they would have covered the sky by the time I got there.

To the north, nothing. To the east, maybe, but I would have to race the cloud cover and even if I got past it, how much time would I have for pictures before it caught up.

So I headed west and hoped that this was just a ridge and it would pass by, leaving the sky clear behind it.

But it was getting close to 2 a.m. when I stopped to use my headlights to shoot a grain field and 2:30 when I aimed my camera at the old elevator at Arrowwood. Still cloudy, it was pushing 3 a.m. when I relied on guesswork to focus my camera on the darkness-hidden waters of Arrowwood Creek by Mossleigh. The clouds were thinning but undershot by the glow of Calgary’s lights when I stopped to shoot the Bow River at Carseland.

And though a few stars were beginning to peek through above a gravel road south of Dalemead, at 4 a.m. the eastern horizon was starting to brighten with the sunrise that was about to be born.

An hour later the night was done and I was home. An hour and a half later, I was in bed.

Frustrated? Sure, but not really. I mean, I got to see the moon spill golden light across a lovely lake. I got to hear the coyotes sing.

And I got to watch bugs dance in a beam of light across a moonlit, starry stage.

So no, I didn’t get what I wanted to get.

But what I got was every bit as good.