Sometime around midnight, after the thunderstorms had broken and cleansed the cloud-choked skies, we decided to try to view the Perseid meteor shower.

I guided my car through the black velvet night and parked on the roadway at the foot of Great Pond Mountain in Orland.

Walking hand in hand, my partner, Robin, and I cast our flashlights on the rocky path upward. The lights themselves were energy-efficient beacons: mine to be shaken up and down for merely half a minute, long enough to create enough electro-magnetic energy to power the lamp for three hours. Hers had a crank handle that did the same.

As we tarried gradually upward, we ducked under the night shadows of the dripping branches, maple saplings and firs still dropping water from the late-evening rain. Large stretches of granite glistened below our feet, weathered and riven with fissures. We kicked the occasional loose rocks, which clattered against the granite beds. Startled by our lights, small frogs flopped from the wet grass to clear our path, our presence a rare unexpected intrusion in their darkly wooded world.

We climbed steadily onward, the only sounds our labored breaths. Under the boughs of evergreens the night air seemed thick and close, the wild smell of dirt and grass rising in our noses. With chests heaving and hearts loud in our ears, we each broke a healthy sweat, our hooded sweatshirts sticking to our backs.

As we neared the summit of the modest Maine mountain, the stars blazed from the firmament, each a fiery gem twinkling from the crushed blackness of space. In the middle distance to our south, the lights of Ellsworth showed their dull orange glow, their manmade light a studied contrast far below the light of stars.

We chose a fairly flat cropping of stone on the bald pate of the little mountain, and threw down our blue tarp. We lay side by side gazing heavenward, amazed at how clearly the Milky Way shown. Above and to the north of us the Big Dipper seemed close enough to draw a drink from.

Our eyes were drawn first to the winking red and white lights of small airplanes, so high and distant we couldn’t hear them, our eyes marking their small progress across the sky.

Our backs hadn’t even adjusted to the contours of the rock under our tarp when Robin saw the first streaking flash shoot low across the horizon. As each piece of cosmic debris blazed and vanished, we expressed our delight, first she, then I, then us together, pointing excitedly and exclaiming “did you see THAT?” This was a light-show far different than the fireworks we had recently seen in Dover-Foxcroft. Within the hour, we counted 31 meteors between us.

As we pondered the ancient paths of stars and planets, Robin patiently pointed out the various constellations visible in the late-summer sky. Here was Draco, there Cassioepeia. As people are wont to do, we connected the dots of stars into visible patterns, pulling, from geometric design, those shapes and figures and stories which might lend some small significance to our own lives.

The vast reaches of outer space may only be matched in their mystery by the curiosity of the human mind. How many centuries, I asked myself, have men and women like ourselves gazed upward and wondered?

As we made our way back down the slope of the mountain, we were filled with a certain hope and light that is only found in exploration and discovery. Silently, we found our way down the wending path to our car on the road below. There was no need for talk when we had witnessed a majesty that words could never convey.

Keith Stover is a freelance writer who lives in Bucksport. Robin is Flight Director of The Challenger Learning Center in Bangor. Stover can be reached at koufax8@verizon.net