Lights Out

January 4, 2021

Back in Toronto in the 20-Oughts, I’d sometimes count the stars visible overhead on a clear night. It wasn’t hard, because it doesn’t take long to count to 40. It was a little sad that I’d have to drive an hour outside the city to see a real night sky. However, during one of my first visits to Amatlan, I found there were well over 160 to be seen, and I could only estimate an accurate count. Even after an iffy day, that later became a compensation for living here.

In the 15 years or so since that night, more people have moved into this area and built houses. More powerful street lights have gone in, especially on the highway south of us, and I can’t see half as many stars now.

Three years ago, the municipality gifted our village with new street lighting, something nobody had asked for, and which is largely superfluous to our needs. There’s very little nocturnal street crime, and of course the lights further block out the stars.

Worse than this is the fact that the lights are usually positioned on 14-ft poles in front of people’s houses. If your bedroom is on that side of the house, then sleeping can be like trying to snooze in a room with all the light-bulbs on. Some people asked the men installing the poles not to position them right in front of bedroom windows, or not to put in light-bulbs, and they’d agree not to. Then, they’d plant them in cement where the plans said they had to go, add the bulbs, and move on to the next job.

Now, I wouldn’t want to imply that at this house, we did or paid for anything bad – no, not at all. After all, I certainly couldn’t climb up a 14-ft pole any more, if I ever could have done. But fortuitously, the light-bulb in the pole right outside my bedroom has gone two years without a working light-bulb. I hope it stays that way. And two weeks ago, I noticed my neighbour’s pole no longer had a working light on it: she, too, had given up trying to live with the glare. The pole at the entrance to the laneway that our six or eight houses are on still works, which makes sense since the roadway rises in a tricky curve. But three out of six poles in this lane are dark now.

How long till the lighting folk come come to fix things? I hope it isn’t soon. 

I miss my multiple stars. When I came here, I had ambitions to resume my juvenile career as an amateur astronomer, but we’re so close to the cliffs that it proved hard to align a telescope; the angle for viewing was just too extreme. Mercury, for example, has never been seen from Amatlan, since it disappears in the glare of the sun before it ascends over those same cliffs. 

And other sights in the skies are harder to see now, even if the angle isn’t too bad. I sold my telescope five years ago, and didn’t acquire a replacement.

Some cities have addressed light pollution. The last time I visited Los Angeles, I was struck that the skies were better than in Toronto, because the city has taken steps to improve matters. If the citizens band together, they can get ordinances passed that give them back some of their stars. Here, there’s no political pressure to do this. It simply isn’t a priority, and you’d have to go much further south, or east into the Yucatan, to find a bejewelled night sky.

But I do like to think that in removing the light outside … er, I mean following the happenstance that the light went out prematurely, a few of the stars overhead were saved for our observing pleasure.