The Joy of Darkness

Will Nixon

Living in Manhattan, I missed the dark. Only once, floating for an hour in an enclosed bathtub presented as a sensory deprivation tank, did I stare into blackness so thick and pure that it might have been the universe before the big bang. I hadn't paid to gaze at nothing, of course. I was floating for enlightenment. At the time, sensory deprivation tanks were a minor fad, promising undistracted journeys into our deepest psyche. Hollywood even produced a move about a brainy hero who floated in a tank resembling a high tech test tube. He was traveling backwards in his mind through evolution to his origins, which, unfortunately for him, were as a vicious ape. It was a werewolf movie with  a New Age twist. I didn't expect to turn violent in the tub. But with luck, as I joked to friends, I might emerge with a few more hairs on my chest.

Alas, I basically felt like a sponge, floating on the buoyant salt water. I  stared impatiently into the blackness as if waiting for a movie to start. For distraction, I raised my fingers and listened to water drops plink and echo in the shapeless chamber. I thought about pizza for dinner. I didn't discover any part of my brain that I didn't already know.

After my hour ended, I quickly forgot about sensory deprivation tanks for more than a dozen years, until one night lying depressed in my marriage bed with the venetian blind shadows on the apartment ceiling, I realized that I hadn't seen pure darkness since I had paid for it at Tranquility Tanks.

My wife complained about the street lamp light that leaked into our bedroom as well. Many times she vowed to buy special curtains with light-proof seals. And I waited for her to do it, convinced she wouldn't, in one of those stupid little tests that collect like pocket change in a jar at the end of a marriage. On nights that I couldn't sleep, I would sit with a cup of tea by the window in our darkened living room, staring at the apartments across the street with blazing windows, wondering why I never saw anybody at home.

After renting my cabin in the Catskills, I slept the first night in my sleeping bag on a bare mattress. I felt a sense of adventure, freedom, and youth, as if I was back in college, when I was always crashing someplace new in my sleeping bag. But I woke up too early, as I always did in the city. Judging by the gray light on the mossy rock outcropping behind my bedroom, it was six a.m. Checking my watch, however, I discovered it was actually eight. And the sun still hadn't climbed up high enough behind the hillside overlooking my cabin to filter directly down through the hemlock trees. My bedroom was the perfect sleeping chamber. I had won my first victory in moving to the country.                          

Among my new supplies, I bought a sturdy black flashlight with a grooved rubber casing like an old bicycle handlebar grip. I liked the rubber smell, the solid grip, the sense of a working man's flashlight that could handle storms and floods and pestilence. I placed it prominently on the red wooden cabinet right by the front door, ready to go. But, somehow, I always forgot it. And it didn't seem to matter. Although I parked on a road without street lamps and then walked down a shady pathway and crossed a footbridge to reach my cabin, I could see well enough at night. The starry sky cast a light that made the wooden bridge shine like pewter, the tan cabin door welcomed me home like Casper the friendly ghost.

Then I returned one damp night with mist in the air. Although I walked down the road easily enough, once I turned onto my path under the trees, I discovered that I literally couldn't see my sneakers. It seemed hard to believe that such complete darkness could exist outdoors. I had always seen shapes at night. But now it was as if I had stepped into an utterly black pool that hid even my body. Looking up, I could see silhouetted branches against the purple black fog, but looking ahead, I was a blind man. I pushed my invisible feet cautiously forward to feel for any tricky roots or rocks. I waved my arms like insect antennas to locate any branches or trees.

I felt apprehensive yet excited by this unexpected adventure. After so many years in Manhattan, where such an outdoor darkness would have been a terrifying breach of the security provided by lights, I was rediscovering darkness in its natural and innocent form. It made my feet notice every little bump in the path. It sharpened my mental sense of direction as I stayed on course. It challenged my eyes to sift the blackness until finally I saw the first dim flannel planks of the footbridge.                                 

After that night, I remembered my flashlight. But I used it sparingly, because darkness was now one of the pleasures of my new country life. Like chocolate, it came in many shades, from the thick blackness under an overcast sky to the chrome sheen of a full moon. It made the trees taller, the creek louder, the mountains huge and wild. At times the air even tingled with the suspense of hid-and-seek as I wondered if nocturnal animals were watching me. One night upon entering my cabin, I caught a white footed mouse in my flashlight beam as it sniffed around flour bags on an open food shelf. For a moment, he scampered along his impromptu stage like a frightened star trying to escape the spotlight, but then he abruptly stopped and stared at me. His black eyes shone like round jewels on the gray fur. They stuck out so dramatically it seemed that with the slightest push they would roll off his face. They were nocturnal eyes, I realized. To see that well at night, I would have needed two big black pool ball eyes straddling my nose. I gained some respect for that mouse. Whenever I needed the flashlight outdoors, I shined the oval beam on the ground ahead of my feet, not wanting to spoil the bigger darkness around me.

Having discovered darkness, I rediscovered light. Nestled under hemlocks on the north slope of the hill, my cabin remained dim and dreary much of the day. When I moved in, the lone bare bulb hanging on an extension cord from a ceiling beam created an interrogation room atmosphere, so I decorated with lamps that chased the gloom away, varnishing the old logs with soft whisky light. At my dinner table, I enjoyed a fanciful illusion, as the table lamp light spilled onto my porch in such a way that the porch railing seemed to belong to an old sailing ship docked against the trees for the night. My lights could perform magic if I used my imagination.

But I became snobbish about light and darkness. Before Christmas, my neighbor wrapped blue lights around a four foot spruce sapling in the middle of his lawn. Although he only visited his cabin on weekends, the tree glowed every night like a gaudy turquoise jewelry pin on the black satin dress of the forest night. At first, I found the lights comical, but I soon resented them as a tacky intrusion and fantasized about cutting the long extension cord from his shed to the tree.

But from my pathway one night, I discovered that I committed worse sins. My cabin blazed with lights like a guard tower above the creek. It shot giant spokes of light throughout the surrounding forest. Nocturnal creatures would find no peace around me. The answer was curtains, of course, but I had priced a basic red and white check pattern for my windows at $200. Maybe I was miserly, but for $200 I expected more than curtains.

So I resigned myself to being a light polluter. Visitors didn't seem to care. To them, walking up to the brightly shining cabin in the dark woods felt like a scene from a magical folk tale. They hinted that I was an urban romantic who idealized the country as a place that should be unsullied by people. And, in truth, I was learning that every animal makes its mess in the woods, from porcupines that stripped tree bark for food to deer that left scat piles everywhere to the beaver at the bottom of my road building a mud pond. But I had lived for so long with city lights carelessly spilled through the streets, blotting out the stars, that I treasured the darkness as a fundamental element of nature that shouldn't be casually spoiled.

One night I drove a Manhattan friend up to he head of my valley, where a small field appears in the forest with a full view of the Milky Way. "This is my personal observatory," I told him. "No lights." The black ridges massed around the valley hadn't been touched by houses. This big pocket of the world was still wild. It showed him the bright yellow dot of Jupiter on the Eastern horizon.

With binoculars, we could actually see the tiniest white pinprick of one of its moons. Then we scanned the ragged belt of the Milky Way. I didn't know many constellations, but I pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, the bright cross of Cygnus the Swan, and Cassiopeia, the constellation I've seen as my mascot since learning it in Boy Scouts because it forms the first initial of my name: W.

The bright star directly overhead, straining our necks to see, was what we wanted: Vega. The previous night I had seen the movie Contact. For the first forty-five minutes, it seemed, the scientist played by Jodie Foster had heard nothing but static from the heavens in her search for signals from alien beings. Her career was falling apart. But in a Hollywood  that made me tingle she finally heard the first loud pulses from an alien civilization saying hello. Their signal had come from Vega, our neighbor 27 million miles away.                        

Now my friend and I stared at Vega for ourselves, sensing the majesty of a single star. Suddenly, I didn't need Hollywood movies, sensory deprivation tanks, or any other artificial excitement. I was in contact with a feeling so grand I shivered. Surrounded by pure mountain darkness, my friend and I had found something missing from all of Manhattan, the wonder of the night sky. I shined my flashlight at Vega, finally confident that my little beam wouldn't ruin a thing.

If you enjoyed these reflections, we invite you to discover other thoughtful and personal writings in the pages of The Best of Pilgrimage and Pilgrimage Vol. 26 and Vol. 27. These can be ordered directly from this website; please click on "How to Order."               

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