RUSH drum legend Neil Peart has posted the following message in the News, Weather And Sports section of his official website:

"Out of nowhere, it appeared in the night sky last summer. Since time immemorial, nights in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec had been utterly dark, speckled with stars, planets, and occasional meteor showers, while the moon in its shifting phases ruled over all. Then suddenly, literally overnight, there was a bright red beacon hanging above the wooded hills to the north, across the lake, all night, every night, unnatural, unblinking, and . . . unignorable.

With no other man-made light in view, save perhaps the yellow glow from the windows of a neighbor’s cottage across the lake—and even that usually only on weekends, when people came up from their homes in Montreal—the nights there are still very dark. But from that fateful night on, that piercing, alien red light ruled the darkness, like the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. I guessed it was an aircraft beacon on some kind of tower, but its scarlet laser Eye was brighter than the stars, brighter than the planets, brighter even than the full moon, and worst of all, I could see it from every room in my house. Every night my eyes were drawn to that dot of red light above the northern horizon, glaring balefully, like a perpetual, malevolent warning. It was a symbol of everything I go to that place to get away from, and I was soon calling it the Eye of Satan.

The bedroom windows in my house were designed to reach down to the level of my bed, so I can sleep with my head beside the window, as near as possible to the outdoors. In summer I keep the windows raised high, screened from insects, but open to the night breezes and the sounds of the wild, like the stirring call of the loons echoing across the lake. In winter, I leave the curtains open (at least when I’m alone, free from spousal objections), so I can look up at the stars, or falling snow, and awaken at first light to see the new day. However, now if I even briefly open my eyes during the night and look outside, I look straight into the Eye of Satan.

Scanning through binoculars at twilight, just as the Eye became visible, the tower itself was noticeable among the tree branches for its straightness—as my drum teacher, Freddie Gruber, pointed out years ago, “There are no straight lines in nature.” When the daylight faded into darkness, the Eye glowed brighter.

As a symbol, it is rather too obvious, and a red light bulb in the sky is not the world’s biggest problem, I know. Given that most people in the western world dwell in a sea of artificial light anyway, they might not even comprehend the problem. But it’s different for those of us who choose to live in the woods, and that man-made intrusion was a serious blight on my personal soulscape. I can’t help but wonder why it is possible for some corporation, and some cooperating government agency, to commit such an invasion of a person’s night sky—of so many people’s night sky. In those low, glacier-raked mountains of forests and lakes, that beacon was surely visible for hundreds of square miles—which would be its purpose, of course, but considered as a first-class felony of “light pollution,” it was pretty heinous."

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