What I Saw At the Moonrise
Jeff Gill

When the moon finally came out from behind a band of cloud, glowing bright orange both dimmer yet more distinct than the lights of Newark spread out below, I was watching my son. He had been dashing from point to point, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t bump the photographer from the Advocate, when a person right in front of me said softly but clearly, "There it is."

I looked up, and my eyes went right to it. A harvest moon, some call it, when wide and low on the horizon a pumpkin of a moon first lifts up with a heave from the land’s edge.

Gasps, and quick mutters of conversation quickly turned into shouts and approving commentary, as if we had somehow helped the celestial body orbit into the right position to be seen by us. There was a sense of participation and involvement, along with the quieter but stronger feeling of witness.

We all were witnesses to something, people ready to testify that an occurrence had in fact taken place before our eyes, made all the more momentous by our having been in this particular place precisely to see exactly what we were looking at. We were witnesses, but we were not innocent bystanders. We were complicit. We were involved.

But what I saw at the moment of moonrise, northerly alignment with angles of earthworks, or whatever the significance, was that my son was there, he was safe, and he was not in any trouble. I saw him interact with professors and journalists, citizens and officials, the learned and the uninformed, other kids and seniors who had welcomed a cart ride up the slope to our hilltop perch.

What I saw, as others saw the moonrise just before I did, was that my child was in the middle of a crowd, finding his proper place (with no little nudging and more direct guidance from his mother and father), sharing in a moment which he could only dimly understand. He had been to planning meetings and conferences, in the Police Building and the Transit Barn, walked the earthworks and alignments of ancient architects for TV cameras and newspaper reporters, and also along the sidewalks of officialdom while his dad made some of the more prosaic arrangements for these events.

My kid had no more idea of what went on that night than he understood why we went to county commission meetings or to the hospital to meet with administrators. He knew that his dad and others thought "the octagon and circles and stuff" were important, which to a seven year old is roughly equivalent to the importance of a bottle of lemonade or a bag of cookies, which is pretty darn important.

He knew he was where he was supposed to be, but I watched him closely, more closely than the patch of sky which was why we were all out there that night, because he also wanted to be other places, like over there, or there, or there. And I was distracted a bit as well, because while I was where I had planned and worked to be that night, I was not quite where I wanted to be; we were not where I had hoped and worked for months and indeed years to put us on that night. So like the little guy, I wanted to be where I was not, too.

When the moon rose, and the ripple of awareness went through the crowd, we all cast our eyes and our awareness out along 51 degrees north, toward the valley of the unified Licking River heading east. We were on Memorial Hill in Geller Park of the City of Heath, but part of all of us was aimed at a point ten miles to a distant horizon, and some 250,000 miles across space to the single satellite of this planet Earth. We may not want to be standing on the surface of the moon, but some aspect, some element of our selves was hurtling out to that steadily moving point in orbit round and round us.

I lost track of my boy for a moment, as I looked intently at what was suddenly revealed in the eastern sky. I saw a vivid idea drawn on the landscape before me, of the Great Circle to my right and the Octagon assemblage to my left behind the trees, and the lines between sketched in thought, with the viewscape framing a neatly divided angle right in front of me. A bit more hazily I saw people standing just in front of me, roughly clothed figures who had supervised unimaginable effort to build a set of enclosures which they knew, but could not be sure, would predict and point to this very phenomenon. All along the hilltop, and in places on ridges behind me and in earthworks before me, I could readily imagine those ancient architects and astronomers, exhilarated by the success of their assumptions, proven once again by the moon’s course.

Then I snapped back to the hard-edged present, and looked to see where he was, and my wife was there, with her arm around him. They were in front of me, in a way those long go residents of this valley would never be, but they were staring intently at just what would have been watched two millennia ago. Call it 500 years the culture we call "Hopewell" would have held sway across this landscape, making use of this valley full of astronomical observation points in earthen walls. Divide, for simplicity, by 20. 25 times, maybe 27 to use the more precise 18.6 year lunar cycle, but almost certainly no more.

25, 27 times to stand in these places with family, with officials, with the community, is all that they had.

Then turn the clock forward, 1500 years. In the wake of Hively and Horn’s rediscovery, we come to this day, or rather these days, since a series of opportunities mitigate the cloudy intervals, both now and then. But this is it, the first time to consciously and intentionally stand and witness that the movements of moon and sun can be predicted, anticipated, comprehended. The first time in a millennia and a half, give or take a generation, and we are here.
My son will be 25 or so when this era’s second chance to witness the northernmost moonrise comes around again t the Newark Earthworks. Possibly he will know, or at least remember, that he was present at the last opportunity for this conjunction when 2024 rolls around. Possibly, I will stand there with him, a little less anxious about whose way he’s getting into.

Whether he will remember, whether he will understand what he witnessed that night, is up to me, to us his parents, and up to his community (educational community and otherwise). He may, and he may not.

But what I saw at the moonrise was that 25 year old and me in my 60’s, standing among the equally hypothetical 2000 year old figures. They are uncertain in outline, but they are real -- at least the past is provably real, since their knowledge is, in our felicitous phrase, "written on the land." My own figure, and that of my descendants knowledgeably taking their place in that group of witnesses standing vigil, is much less certain.

What I saw at the moonrise was people, standing on the surface of this planet, eyeing the antics of another heavenly body looping and curving around our own in odd but understandable patterns. What I saw at the moonrise was my child, my ancestors, and possibly my descendants if my witness is passed along properly. What I saw at the moonrise was my community, as it was before me, as it is at its best, and I believe I even saw how it might yet be, cycles and generations and millennia to come.

That is what, or rather whom I saw, at the moonrise.