Built to Spill — Ultimate Alternative Wavers

2 × Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Numbered, Gold Transparent, 2014

If you haven’t been camping in Yellowstone, or if you haven’t spent the night at an acreage a few miles out of town, or if you haven’t lived in a place where cities are still barely a notion — where the mountains keep the Targets at bay and the farms space everyone out enough that it’s a mile walk from mailbox to mailbox — then you probably haven’t really seen the moon.

You’ve seen the moon on its own, sure. It’s bright enough to get through the hazy glow of town lights. It’s always first on the call list. But you’ve never seen it with its friends. With the stars you know, yeah, but also with the stars you don’t know. The ones that hide behind Orion’s belt. The ones that fill in the Big Dipper.

You’ve never seen the Milky Way — a faint cloud of millions — and you’ve never struggled to count, because counting is impossible when everything you see can be counted.

This isn’t a mushy rumination on the power of the sky or the beauty of outer space. It’s just a reminder that getting out of town is amazing, and seeing the stars is amazing, and it’s not hard to do. At all. You just need to look up when everything else seems distant and dark.