I know the summer constellations well. Cassiopeia, chained to her chair. Cygnus, the swan with the bright star Deneb in his tail. Aquila, the eagle, bearing thunderbolts across the sky. The stars all hung just where my mom first pointed to them, back when I was small.

The Utah night is clear. I am with a group of twelve people, three days deep into Desolation Canyon, a remote river corridor accessible only by boat. I grew up on rivers like this one. My cousin and I, born two months apart like symbolic twins, learned how to run rapids from my mom, my aunt, and my uncle, all former Grand Canyon River Rangers who ruled the Colorado River in the eighties.

Now, I point the constellations out as they were once shown to me.

I trace their starry outlines, naming them for Matt—a cute climber who has never been on a river trip before. The last chunks of ice in my drink melt. My mom, now in her seventies, is far away in California. My aunt and my uncle, inside Desolation Canyon with us, went to bed hours ago.

The sky looks soft. But then I see something I don’t recognize.

“What the hell is that?” I say, tipping back in my camp chair. A line of lights inches across the sky in an uncanny straight line.

“Oh ho,” says Matt. “There goes Starlink.”

“There goes what?”

“Satellites. Elon Musk’s Internet project,” he says, “We could be surfing the web right now.”

Musk is constructing a hyper-online world. Utopia in his own image, digital connection suddenly possible in remote places where it never was before.

The passion project meets a need, Musk claims, for global Internet access. “Unmet demand” is the business jargon for an opportunity in the market, though it makes no useful distinction between what people ask for and what they can be convinced to buy.

With ten billion dollars and a privately owned space company, any man can play Prometheus: the titan who blurred the line between man and god. His gift of fire, so often framed as benevolent, as if it wasn’t simply downstream of his ambition.

In 2019, the FCC approved the first launch of Starlink satellites with no environmental review. Before Starlink, there were fewer than 1,000 satellites in low Earth orbit—soon there will be 42,000. Metallic bodies reflecting light, enough of them to disturb the remotest night sky.

Meanwhile, I am still hung up that the word for a cluster of satellites is “constellation,” as if there is no meaningful difference between a machine and a star.

***

We are five days deep into Desolation Canyon, setting up camp when the smell of wet earth reaches us. Far away, precipitation stirs the soil. The desert breathes. Geosmin. Ozone burns as lightning sizzles through the distant sky.

“Petrichor,” I told my uncle once when we were deep in the desert. “That’s the word for that rain smell. From ichor, the blood of the Greek gods. The blood of the gods in the rocks.”

He didn’t believe me. It is almost too beautiful to be real. His doubt was so convincing that I retracted my fact until we made it back to cell service.

The evening goes heady. The desert turns over around us. Blooms.

Then there is rain—the violent rain of the desert. It’s my turn to cook, and I’m trying to make Instant Rice on the camp stove. The propane flame flutters. Afraid to waste gas, I turn it off. I kick at the rain-puckered sand with my bare feet.

The air is shiny and wet. I’m still wearing a pearl-snap sun shirt and my Astral life jacket, neon emergency whistle rattling on the lapel. I have not packed a rain shell. I have this potentially stupid theory that I’ll need less gear if I can just be tough.

My uncle appears in the kitchen, his face obscured by the dark hood of his rain jacket.

“Where is everyone?” he asks.

“In their tents,” I say. “It’s raining.”

A smile flashes over his face, and I realize I missed the joke.

Around us, the camp tables are stacked with metal bowls and cooking pots, all of them rattling as they fill with rainwater. My uncle lifts the lid off the rice pot, restless with nothing to do.

“And where’s Matt? He didn’t fall in the river, did he?”

This, too, is a joke. Or maybe it’s not. But Matt is fine. I point to where he’s standing, looking out at the water, bundled in blue Gore-Tex. Matt spins around, grinning at us, and I know what he’s thinking. I’ve known him for five days, but I know.

Through the rain, the air is clotted with mayflies and cottonwood fluff, the whole canyon damp and saturated with color. In the distance, the gray sky is streaked with sheets of rain. I can hear soft sucking sounds as carp kiss up at the surface of the river.

There is so much life in these river canyons. It would be so easy to never know about any of it.

***

The story goes that my mom was looking down at Lava Falls, the largest rapid on the Colorado River, scouting it with her coworkers. She was still young then, and always small, with delicate wrists and long hair. She lacked brawn but read river currents with a compensatory and mystical urgency. So maybe it was the improbability of her that prompted another burly boatman to turn to her and say, “We’ll have to pray to the river gods to let us through.”

She shook her head. “You just have to put your boat in the right place.”

Even then she was scrappy—at the mercy of no divine power but her own.

I grew up on these stories.

Like the one where my aunt ran Cataract Canyon in 1981 when high water had swelled the Colorado River like the Styx.

Everyone was afraid to use the standard eighteen-foot rigs, but she did it. She ran the whole stretch, right through the series of rapids known as the Big Drops. Even at normal water levels, the hydraulics, named Little Niagara and Satan’s Gut, could swallow boats whole—at flood stage they churned like black holes. Brave or insane or both—she slipped by.

I never get tired of hearing about that run. Really, it’s a love story. The moment when a legend about the flood becomes a legend of our family. The moment when my uncle, watching from shore, thought, “She’s the one.”

***

River miles pass faster before noon.

I keep close pace with my cousin’s raft. He rarely stops rowing, moving forward through the flat water. Steady and even, like our parents taught us. It feels good: this skill I took years to master. My body is as capable as it will ever be. My oar blades dip and dip and dip.

Above us, the desert sky is painfully blue. There isn’t a cloud in sight, just an atmospheric frontier that goes on forever. We wind around several river bends. I watch my cousin drop into a small, splashy rapid. When I notice how the top wave kicks his boat to the left, I adjust my entrance accordingly. There is a bright spray of water.

Eventually, my cousin yanks his raft into an eddy, and I float up alongside him.

“I’m going to give the other boats a chance to catch up,” he says. There is an adult patience to his voice.

I spin in my seat and look back. I don’t see my uncle’s raft, or my aunt’s. My mom, unable to join us, is all the way back home, where she will soon begin radiation therapy. Looking upriver, I don’t see anyone. It’s just us.

Without meaning to, we left the older generation behind.

 ***

In 2017, SpaceX trademarked the name Starlink.

“If anyone is curious, the name was inspired by The Fault in Our Stars,” tweeted Musk.

John Green’s young adult novel about star-crossed cancer patients was itself named for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Cassius laments human agency, not fate, when he says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves.”

And yet Musk did not name his project after Shakespeare’s famous words on self-determination. He named it—inadvertently perhaps—for the inevitability of death.

Some days, despite my best efforts, I think about the rich man filling the sky with machinery like he doesn’t know it’s mine. Like he doesn’t know that vast places beyond the reach of technology are the inheritance my family left me.

 ***

On our last night in Desolation, the air is bright with insect chirps.

“I demand to see Starlink again,” I say, stomping my foot in the sand so people know I’m doing comedy. I say goodnight and follow Matt to his tent, loopy and relaxed and ready to sleep. When I walk up behind him, he turns to wrap his arms around me.

I glance skyward.

“Look,” I say, pointing at the dotting lights of Starlink, visible again, passing across the sky. “I manifested it.”

He holds me away from him then, taking me in carefully.

“Are you real?” he asks, almost accepting that I pulled these satellites through the universe. As if they aren’t everywhere already. As if he believes I could steal them right out of the sky. He is flirting. Still, for a moment, the mock awe on his face is catching. I look up at the lights, and what I can do. I am astounded and afraid.