My parents and grandparents taught me to appreciate the beauty of the earth.

Dad was raised on a lovely farm in southwestern Ohio. The vintage farmhouse stood on a prominent hilltop, where from the porch one could look out over the entire farm and the surrounding countryside beyond. My grandmother used to say that when they first moved there in 1916, even from that vantage point, no lights could be seen in any direction.

She had been raised in Clifton, Ohio, which is very near Cincinnati. Transplanted from the city as she was, the beauty of the country thrilled her. She had said that during her early years on the farm, she had especially enjoyed the loveliness of the night sky. As years passed, the proliferation of electric lights slowly caused the night sky to become more and more obscured. By the 1960s, you were lucky if you could make out even the brightest of celestial objects. This loss was always a source of sadness for her.

Forty some years ago in the 1960s, when I was still young, my father brought me here to Brevort Lake, and one of the first things he did was introduce me to the night sky. It was the same sky my grandmother had been talking about all those years ago.

“Look up!” he said. And there it was, so bright and clear. I never knew there were so many stars. Like my grandmother, I was smitten with the beauty of it.

It is such lovely and wonderful country here, but every year now there is more development, and even here the sky is beginning to be obscured by the lights. So many folks come up from the city and suburbs and many equate outdoor lighting with progress. I also think it gives some folks a sense of security, but when you come up here to escape the city, why bring the city up with you? Along the lake these lights are reflecting off the water, across the lake, and into the sky. It’s a triple whammy. We are losing the flavor of the wilderness and we are creating the flavor of the city.

I was intrigued by a story I read several years ago. It was a story related to a major earthquake that occurred in the San Francisco Bay area in the fall of 1989. After the initial quake, area residents had moved outside of their homes, choosing to sleep outdoors rather than risk having their houses fall down on top of them in the event of an aftershock. As darkness came, local police departments were inundated with calls from stressed out citizens, who were frightened by strange objects they were seeing in the night sky. It turned out that what they were seeing was nothing more than the stars, the moon, and the planets -- the normal night sky made so much more prominent with the power grid down and the lights out. Since there was no light and no TV, many people were seeing the natural night sky for the first time and they were frightened because they didn’t know what they were looking at!

Let’s not let things get so out of whack here. If you feel you must have a security light, then please shield it from the sky and the lake. Now that would be real progress.

Chuck Becker

Moran Rome, Ohio