Stars, galaxies and car accidents

When we look up at the skies at night in England you hardly see anything except the brightest stars - at least not where I live. There's just too much light everywhere.
When I was in Greece, walking back at night to where I was staying , the skies were so much brighter - you could see a lot more up there, because there aren't so many lights. You can see quite a lot of the sky - lots of stars and planets quite clear. And there were always bats flying around the street lights to catch the moths and other insects they attracted - not small bats either.
Anyway the thing I'm writing this about happened when I was driving back after dark on what would be a main road over here, but was like a country lane over there. You go through villages, seeing people sitting in roadside cafes and families out walking, and then you're on a road with nothing but your headlights to follow. The sort of road you don't often find in this country, but which you do over there - a really dodgy surface, no markings, quite big drops off the edges, and it's not always wide enough for two cars, plus it's dark out there too. Seriously dark. If it hadn't been for an accident, I would never have seen what I did, which was a really amazing sight.
I'd just driven through one of a series of small villages, about a mile or so back, and was following a lorry that was going a bit faster than I was - he knew the road and I didn't. Suddenly, by the side of the road, there was a woman waving at me to stop, by a car that was obviously not quite on the road. The lorry went straight by as if she wasn't there. So I stopped - it was the middle of nowhere, after all, and there was obviously something wrong, and you don't just drive on past, well not if you've got any humanity. It turned out she'd missed the road (just a bit) , gone off the edge and hit a rock with her front wheel. The wheel was totally ruined, as was the tyre. She spoke hardly any English, but she wasn't Greek - I speak a little Greek - she was German, spoke a language I can't even begin to understand. After a while of trying to work out what needed doing, and trying to ring her emergency cover - it was a hire car - and once you managed to find somewhere where there was a decent mobile signal to call from - the call just went through to an answerphone. It was obvious that she needed more help than I was able to offer. She needed a wheel changing, and I had to get back. There was someone else in the car with her, but it was an old guy who would be no help at all with changing a wheel. She'd got loads of stuff in the boot too. Just then, about half a dozen local people from the last village I'd gone through turned up and after a bit of a chat ( in English) it was obvious to them that I couldn't hang around - I had a 3 year old ( my grand daughter) in the car, who needed to get home, that I didn't actually know the lady, that I'd stopped to help her because it was an emergency ( which made me one of the good guys in their book) and that they could help her change the wheel. So I left them to it, with thanks all round.
To me there were two amazing things about all this -one - there I was in the middle of the Greek countryside, nowhere near a big tourist area, and yet the people who came up the road, who were local villagers, spoke really good English - and spoke some German too. It certainly wouldn't happen here - where I live the chances of finding someone who spoke another language would be pretty low, if not non-existent. Most people round here would struggle with anything other than English - and some of them even struggle with that sometimes !

But the most amazing thing was that while I was waiting for one of us to get through to her emergency number on a mobile, I looked up. Just looked up at the night sky. There was nothing else to do, anyway. Wow. You could see every star that ever shone in that part of the sky ever, and you could see the Milky Way so clear it was like a white path across the sky. Just like the name. It just made you realise how small it all is down here, and how little has really changed with the advance of so-called civilisation. The stars are all still there, not changed, and their mystery is as powerful as it always was. And that's when I decided that that's where I want to live - not the place itself, there aren't any houses there - but somewhere where, when you look up at night, you can see the stars. All of them. Daytime will look after itself. It just felt like somewhere I belonged, in the middle of nowhere, with no lights but where the sky was bright enough to see your way home. Home. Maybe I'll be there again some night. That's what I hope.