Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Lesson from the Stars

Episode 52 in a series of true rideshare stories

I drive her almost an hour from the Boise airport to Idaho City, a tiny mountain town of a few hundred people, where she is staying because she tells me every hotel in Boise was booked. I went to high school in Idaho City but I haven’t been there in a long time. Along the way, I tell her about the town. I point out spots from my childhood even though it’s after midnight and she can’t see them. “It was a long drive from my dad’s place to my mom’s, so they used to meet there and trade us off,” “Over there was a big rock we used to jump from into the creek,” “That was my house. It’s a camp or something now, but it used to be a home.”

When I drop her off and head back to Boise, it’s a long drive by myself. Most of the winding, mountain highway gets bad cell service, so I start off listening to a podcast, but before long it cuts out and I drive in silence, getting bored, counting down the mile markers.

Halfway back, I have to pee. There are no rest stops, but it’s mostly forest on both sides of the highway and no one is out here in the middle of the night, so when there’s a safe place to pull over I get out and walk to the tree line.

I’m struck by the dark. It’s been a while since I’ve seen country dark. It’s not the same as city dark. Some people who have lived in the city their whole lives have never seen real dark. As I stand at the tree line, I see nothing, but light draws my eyes upward to a clear sky where stars shine down, and it strikes me that I haven’t seen the stars—really seen them, the way you see them in country dark—in a year or more. I watch them for a minute, remembering those childhood skies, then I go back to my car.

Driving in silence, still waiting for the podcast to kick back on when cell service returns, my headlights illuminating these familiar curves, I get an odd feeling. A voice in my head says, “You were about to have a moment, you idiot. There was a lesson there, when you were looking at the stars, and you literally pissed it away.”

When there is another chance, I pull over again. This time I shut off the engine and leave my phone in the car. I use the front bumper as a step to climb onto the hood of my car, then I lie on my back on the roof, looking at the sky with a little more focus.

I remember how it happens. At first you see 100 stars. The bright ones. They strike you right away, and they’re pretty. But if you’re patient, if you don’t let your phone or another light distract you, in a few minutes you will see 1,000, and pretty becomes beautiful. The longer you wait, the more they reveal themselves, until they bring with them something more.

I wait.

It’s cold and I don’t have a jacket but I decide I don’t mind. I let myself feel the cold, I listen to a creek somewhere in the dark that I can’t see, and I wait for the stars to come to me.

I see one edge of the sky that glows with ugly light pollution, and I know that’s Boise. That’s home. I think of Henry David Thoreau, who walked away from civilization and found himself transfixed by the way ice cracked on a pond. I think of a conversation from the movie My Dinner with Andre, which I watched for the first time recently, about an electric blanket and how technology insulates us, seduces us with comfort as it takes us out of our shared world and puts us into worlds of our own, so subtly that we don’t realize we’ve lost something.

I think of ancient civilizations that looked at these stars, shining down just as they do now. I think of how they saw them every night, how they had no choice but to see them, and how today we miss them. I wonder, despite the obvious benefits of the incredible cities we’ve built, if we’ve given up too much of the world’s majesty in return. Ancient man looked up and saw gods. We see streetlights. But if we get away from the streetlights and let our eyes adjust, the gods are still there.

And now I like that I’m cold. I like that the cold is something I’m feeling, that the creek is something I'm hearing. There are thousands of stars now. An infinite universe. And I am in it. I am part of it. I am here. For a while.

Eventually, the moment passes and I climb down from the car. I get back in and I drive. My phone gets a signal and the podcast comes back on. I listen to strangers joke about trivial things and I can’t hear the creek. The heater is on and I can’t feel the cold. My high beams light the road and I can’t see the stars.

And I do feel insulated. But I am glad I took a moment to stop.

I make a mental note not to let it be years before I look at the stars again.

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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver has been a series of true stories from my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver, which were posted every Monday in 2025. Perhaps I’ll tell some more sometime.