The Intercepted Frequency on the Porch | Old La Sal Night Sky Listening

In the mountains, the sky is not only something you look at; even in Old La Sal, the night becomes something you listen to, especially when you dare to bring a radio into the silence.

He did not come to Deer Creek Retreat for "rest" this time.

He came with a question.

Short‑Wave Radio Under the Old La Sal Night Sky listening

Months earlier, a friend had sent him a late‑night message with a simple line: “You know you can hear the sky too, right?” Attached was a link—an article about early radio astronomy and short‑wave disturbances, about an engineer who once traced mysterious static to the heart of the Milky Way.

Something about that story lodged in his mind. Not just the science, but the image: a human being standing beneath a sky that speaks in frequencies they never expected.

He had always loved stars.

But lately, looking up hadn’t been enough.

There was a restlessness in him, a sense that he had been living too much on the surface of things. He’d been preaching, counseling, writing, parenting—good work, holy work—but beneath it all, he felt like someone who had once listened deeply and somehow drifted away from that habit.

So when he booked the main cabin at Deer Creek Retreat, not the tiny home this time, he packed something extra alongside his clothes and notebooks:

A compact short‑wave receiver.

Nothing fancy. Just a sturdy radio with an extendable antenna, a knob for tuning, and a pair of headphones worn soft from years of use.

He drove into Old La Sal as late afternoon slid into evening, following the familiar curve of the road up and over “Suicide Hill”—a section of road where, for reasons no one quite understands, deer famously wander into headlights from either direction—before dropping into the basin where the cabin sat. The five fenced acres held the main house with its broad porch, distant neighbors scattered discreetly across the landscape, their lights faint against the wide-open sweep of desert and sky.

Inside, the main cabin felt spacious but personal: a large front room with generous seating, a full kitchen ready for long stays, and that porch—wide and inviting—stretching toward the view. It wasn’t isolation; it was breathing room. Enough distance that the sky could feel like a dominant presence again.

He dropped his bags, carried the radio and headphones out to the porch, and set them on a small table near the edge of the cement.

The air was still.

The sun hovered over the ridge, the La Sal Mountains catching the glow, and a warm gold light ran across the basin. As it sank, shadows lengthened, and the land took on that quiet tone recognizable to anyone who’s lingered outside at true dusk—a softness that feels like the world inhaling before it exhales night.

From the porch, he could see everything he needed to see: the ridge line, the silhouettes of scattered junipers, the sky opening in a vast bowl above. It struck him that this porch was a kind of a front row seat in a vast theater, with the night as a stage and the stars a script.

He went back inside, turned off unnecessary lights, and grabbed a notebook.

If he was going to listen, he wanted to pay attention.

Darkness arrived like a slow, deliberate blessing.

One by one, the stars appeared, then ten by ten, then by the hundreds. The Milky Way spread across the sky with that same impossible clarity he remembered from previous visits. Old La Sal was not the middle of nowhere, but it was far enough from the glow of Moab or any kind of civilization that the night could still do its ancient work unhindered.

He set the short‑wave radio on the porch table, extended the antenna, and slipped the headphones over his ears.

At first, there was only noise.

Static.

Snaps and hiss.

The low, restless flutter of atmospheric interference.

He began to tune, turning the dial slowly, letting each band wash over him. He’d done this back home, catching distant broadcasts and time signals, short bursts of coded transmissions, the occasional voice from some far‑off country riding the waves. But here, under this sky, the practice felt different.

He felt almost like a man standing at a confessional window, listening for a voice behind the screen.

He paused.

Under the static, there were faint rhythms—natural ones. Lightning somewhere far away, solar influences, the ordinary kind of cosmic noise that radio enthusiasts learn to recognize.

He closed his eyes.

“This is stubborn,” he whispered to himself. “But maybe stubborn is all I’ve got right now.”

He tuned again.

Minutes passed.

He jotted notes in the margin of his notebook—frequencies, times, brief impressions. The cement porch was cool under his bare feet. The air brushed against his skin. Somewhere nearby, a fence creaked. The cabin behind him glowed faintly with warm light.

Far above, the Milky Way watched.

Then something changed.

The static thinned.

In its place, a faint, regular pulse emerged.

At first, he thought it was his imagination, some part of his mind hungry for pattern. But the more he listened, the clearer it became: a rhythmic, non‑random sequence of sound. Not the familiar time signals he’d heard before, not the crisp voices of distant broadcasters or the sharp pops of interference.

Just a steady, precise pulse.

He checked the dial.

He hadn’t moved it.

The frequency seemed to have come to him, not the other way around.

He listened closer.

The pulses were spaced with almost unnerving regularity—not quite like a mechanical clock, not quite like a natural astronomical source he recognized, but somewhere in between. Too clean to dismiss, too unlike his usual catches to categorize immediately.

His heart began to race.

He thought of the first radio astronomers, of a young scientist staring at printouts of repeating signals and joking about “little green men” before realizing she had discovered a pulsar.

He thought of all the times he’d told others that God could speak through silence, through scripture, through circumstance. Tonight, a different question rose in him:

What if the universe is never truly silent? What if I’ve just never listened like this before?

The pulses continued.

He tried switching bands.

They held.

He moved the antenna slightly—up, outward, angled toward the ridge.

No change.

It was as if the signal were not coming from a single direction, but soaking the space around him.

He swallowed, throat suddenly dry.

“Okay,” he murmured. “If this is just natural… it’s still holy. If it’s… something else… it’s still holy.”

The line between science and wonder blurred.

He tuned a fraction of a turn.

The pulses sharpened.

They came now with a subtle rise and fall, almost melodic, as if layered over one another. There were brief gaps, then clusters, patterns too short yet to decode, but persistent.

He wrote down numbers and impressions, knowing he might never make sense of them, but wanting at least to bear witness.

Then the world above him shifted.

Not in sound first.

In shadow.

The Milky Way dimmed.

Not entirely—its band still traced the sky—but for a brief, startling moment, a swath of stars disappeared, erased as though someone had dragged a brush of darkness across the canvas.

He opened his eyes and tore the headphones from his ears.

The porch, the car in the parking area, the cabin roof—everything was cast in a sudden, shallow gloom.

He looked up.

A shape glided silently across the sky, just above the ridge.

It was massive.

Triangular.

No navigation lights, no blinking beacons, no engine roar. Its edges were sharp yet somehow indistinct, the way a shadow looks when cast across uneven ground. It moved with a kind of slow, deliberate grace that felt less like flying and more like drifting.

For one long second, it blocked nearly the entire densest portion of the Milky Way from his view.

The stars returned behind it as it passed, like distant candles reappearing after a dark hand moves away.

His body reacted before his mind could.

He stepped forward to the edge of the porch, his whole body leaning into the dark as if trying to close the distance.

The craft was close enough that he felt as if he could reach out and touch it, though he knew that was impossible. Close enough that every instinct told him he was being watched—even if no windows were visible, even if the entire underside seemed matte and featureless.

He whispered, almost involuntarily:

“Are You the same?”

He didn’t know who he was addressing.

The God he’d served and questioned.

The unknown intelligence that might be piloting this silent triangle.

The universe itself.

All he knew was that standing there, barefoot on a wooden porch in Old La Sal, Utah, with a short‑wave radio still humming faintly behind him, he felt seen in a way that bypassed language.

The craft drifted along the ridge line.

For a moment, it hovered, as though considering the cabin and its solitary watcher. Then, without acceleration, without sound, it continued its path and slowly faded—blending first with the darkness above, then with the star field, until it vanished completely.

The Milky Way shone unhindered again.

He stood there, chest tight, staring at the space where it had been.

The night around him felt altered, as if someone had entered a room and then left, but the room remembered.

He turned slowly back toward the radio.

The headphones lay where he’d dropped them.

The receiver’s dial glowed with a soft, indifferent light.

The pulses had changed.

He lifted the headphones, hesitated, then placed them back over his ears.

The signal was still there.

But now the rhythm had shifted—slower, deeper, more spaced apart, like a breathing pattern. It no longer felt like a distant echo or a cosmic clock. It felt, bizarrely, like a call and response.

For several cycles, the pulses came.

Then, in one brief, uncanny moment, there was silence.

The radio hissed quietly, blank.

He realized that his own breathing had fallen into sync with the previous rhythm.

He exhaled.

And just as he did, a new pulse came—single, sharp, almost like a reply.

He laughed once, incredulous, then found that his eyes were wet.

“This is ridiculous,” he said aloud, more to himself than anything else. “It’s just atmospheric. It’s just… it’s just…”

His words petered out.

Somewhere inside him, a quieter voice spoke:

Or it’s a reminder that you are not alone in this wide, wide universe.

He sank slowly into the porch chair.

For a long time, he listened.

Not with the expectation of decoding messages or solving mysteries, but with the simpler intention of being present. The pulses rose and fell, sometimes regular, sometimes shifting. The sky displayed its galaxies and clouds of stars with patient indifference. The cabin stood like a small, steady hull in a sea of darkness.

He thought of all the souls he’d sat with in hospitals, all the monitors and beeping machines, all the signals that tracked life and loss. Tonight, the beeps were replaced by silent shadows and radio pulses—but the feeling was strangely familiar:

He was, once again, in the presence of something immense, fragile, and sacred.

When the night finally eased toward dawn, the pulses thinned, and the radio returned to ordinary static.

He powered it off.

The sky remained magnificent, though some stars began to fade as the horizon brightened. He watched the first hints of morning brush the edges of the La Sal Mountains.

Then he spoke, not into the radio, but into the quiet.

“God… if all of this is only natural, it’s still Yours. If anything in it is intentional, it’s still Yours. Help me hold wonder without needing to control the explanation.”

He knew that, by most standards, what he had experienced would sound strange.

Short‑wave enthusiasts would point to atmospheric phenomena. Astronomers to pulsars or other sources of radio noise. Skeptics to imagination. He respected them all. They might even be right.

But the meaning he carried away was simpler and more personal:

In a world where he had grown used to managing, planning, and explaining, he had found a porch where he could simply listen—to static, to pulses, to silence—and be surprised again.

Night sky listening in Old La Sal, Utah was not a hobby.

It was a practice.

A way of returning, again and again, to the reality that the universe is not mute, that creation hums with signals we may never fully interpret, and that sometimes, getting away to a dark sky Airbnb near Moab Utah with a porch and a radio is enough to remember that he was part of something vast, intimate, and full of mystery.

He closed his notebook.

Tomorrow, someone else might sit on this porch—maybe with a camera, maybe with a cup of coffee, maybe with nothing but their thoughts. They might never hear pulses or see a shadowed craft drift across the Milky Way.

But if they paused long enough, he believed they would still hear something:

In their own heartbeat.

In the rustle of the wind.

In the quiet insistence of a sky that has been speaking long before humans learned to measure its frequencies.

He smiled, whispering one final line before stepping inside to rest.

“Thank You for the chance to listen.”

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A Challenge to You

If part of you longs not just to see the night sky but to listen for what the silence might be saying, consider spending an evening on the Main Cabin porch or the seating area of the Tiny Home in Old La Sal. Bring a simple short‑wave radio, or just bring your ears and a notebook. Turn down the lights, step outside, and sit with whatever rises—from static, from stars, from your own soul. Let the porch become your listening post, and see what frequencies of wonder you intercept.

Cheers,

Justin

About the Author

Justin holds a Ph.D. in Education and is an ordained professional chaplain, specializing in the integration of motivation and choice theory, psychological resilience, and pastoral soul care. He transitioned from a ten-year active duty career as a Chaplain in the U.S. Army, serving in the high-intensity environment of a critical care hospital, the Airborne and 1ID "Big Red One" where he learned to sit with people in their deepest valleys and darkest nights.

His work now bridges empirical behavioral science with practical strategies for long‑term identity formation and spiritual growth, often drawing on the solitude and vast night skies of the high‑desert around Old La Sal.

Justin serves as the primary researcher and writer for grittygritgrit.com, a digital platform dedicated to helping individuals cultivate authentic perseverance through profound transitions, traumas, and seasons of suffering. You can explore more of his high-mountain-desert reflections, stories, and resources at deercreeklasal.com or just book a couple of nights stay in Old La Sal, experience it yourself.