The Night Watch

Dr. Chloe Ross lives her life in the dark. For nine months of the year, she lives in a tiny silver trailer parked in the middle of Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, a vast expanse of dry flatwoods located thirty miles from the nearest street light. Ross is an astronomer and lightning researcher who has been hired to monitor the sky quality of the preserve, which is officially designated as Florida’s only dark-sky park. Her days are spent sleeping behind blacked-out windows, while her nights are spent operating a motorized Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and measuring the ambient light pollution that creeps from the distant coastlines.

The paradox of Ross's career is that her search for perfect, pristine darkness has made her highly sensitive to light of any kind. She cannot tolerate the glow of a smartphone screen or a digital clock, claiming that a single spark of artificial light can ruin her night vision for hours. Yet her entire research setup is powered by a high-tech array of lithium batteries and digital light sensors that require continuous monitoring on her laptop. "I am trying to measure the void, but I need the very technology that is destroying it to do my job," Ross said, pointing her green laser pointer toward the faint, milky band of our galaxy.

Around three in the morning, a thick blanket of fog begins to roll in from the Kissimmee River, obscuring the stars and wrapping her observatory in a damp, silent shroud. Ross doesn't pack her gear; instead, she sits on a folding chair in the damp grass, listening to the distant, mechanical call of a sandhill crane. She knows that as long as the surrounding developments continue to expand, this pocket of darkness will eventually be swallowed by the orange glow of progress. For now, however, she is content to sit in the cool dark, a quiet guardian of the night.