The comfort of natural darkness
Image from Altphotos
Recently, I’ve been craving the experience of natural darkness. This is hard to find when you live in a large metropolitan area, as my friend and I discovered when we went in search of a place from which to view the August meteor showers. We found a reasonably dark park in Langley, spread our tarp and lay down to watch the summer sky. Moments later, a bright meteor passed directly overhead. Seated or standing, we’d have missed this celestial messenger.
Last year in Western Australia, a tour with an Aboriginal guide provided a delicious experience of natural darkness. We sat in the sand near the beach, hunched round a campfire, while our guide prepared bush tucker by roasting whole mullet on the coals. After it cooled on a branch of acacia, we ate the succulent white fish, cooked to perfection, with our bare hands.
As darkness thickened, Capes pointed out the constellation of the Southern Cross, which his people call the Emu in the Sky. He described how its reversed celestial position marks the season of harvesting the eggs of that enormous bird. What luxury to listen to such a story beneath a sky full of unfamiliar stars, with the only other light coming from the coals of the dying campfire.
Once many years ago, I remember hiking to the Black Tusk Meadows in the dark. Starting up the trail in mid-afternoon, we hadn’t allowed enough time to get to the campsite before nightfall. That miscalculation challenged me, but it opened me up a mystical experience. To this day I cannot explain how I found it so easy to ascend the forested trail in darkness. Something, perhaps a subtle combination of air and sound, guided me unerringly around the switchbacks as I led the way through the night, bringing us safely out of the woods. The gloaming of the moonlit Alpine meadows seemed luxuriously light after the thick blackness on the narrow trail beneath tall firs.
As happens with memories, one evokes another: walking home on a summer’s night through velvet darkness from from visiting a friend who lived in a tiny house on an island in the Skeena River. As I walked past unlit farms, I stopped in the middle of the deserted road to gaze up in gratitude at the starry sky. Crossing the bridge and passing beneath a wan streetlight gave me a sad feeling, as if I’d left a mythical world to return to a more mundane reality.
When I was a child, darkness was common and normal. In the northern summers, my brother and I played outside in the long late dusk. On occasion, if we were lucky, Mom let us stay outside even after dark. Nowadays, those of us who live in metropolitan areas find it increasingly difficult to escape the human-made lights that grow ever brighter and more numerous.
At White Rock, I can no longer walk along the beach promenade at dusk. “Improvements” have included cementing over a large swath of former lawn and shrubs, and installing cement steps with glaringly bright underfoot lights built in. All along West Beach, the trees are wound tight with string upon string of bright yellow lights, and some joggers even put flashing lights on their shoes.
Writer Elizabeth George once said at a conference that she writes from the dark, into the dark. How wise. It is by facing the dark that we shed light on things hitherto unseen.