Darkness
In the world in
which I live, in my world in which sunshine is a relentless, frequently
friendly constant during most days, darkness doesn’t happen even after the sun
goes down.. Living in an exurban
community, it never really gets dark. I
can see the moon at night, and sometimes, satellites or stars, or even a
distant plane, flying by. But, when I
get up at 2 or 3 am, and wake enough to look out the window, I notice that the
sky is light, it never gets really dark.
No wonder, that my sleep patterns are disturbed, as are those of many
that I know. Even when I sleep in a room
darkened by a window covering which does not allow the outside world to
intrude, there is no such thing as a fully dark room. The television set has a light that glows, my
atomic clock projects the time in bright red numbers on the wall next to my
bed, and in one hotel room recently, just above my head, there was a smoke
detector glowing with a green light.
This kind of non-dark darkness is something that I have learned to take
for granted. There is no such thing as a
dark room, or a dark place, as our ancestors knew it. No place where in the
dark of night, one cannot see one’s hand in front of one’s face.
Studying, as my Talmud study partners and I have been doing,
when it is that one should say the “Shema” the
Torah is clear that one should say it when one lies down and when one rises
up. The discussion in Talmud is long and
convoluted as to what time it is when “one lies down”. In fact our group has been discussing this for
more weeks than I can now count. Our ancestors were more governed by nature’s
cycles, sleeping during the dark hours and waking when the sun rose. When I was a child, my parents enforced
bedtimes that were closer to those of the sun’s rising and falling than I
believe most parents do today.
As I said in my
opening line, my world never gets really dark.
Recently, on a trip to visit with my daughter and her family in a cabin
in the Berkshires, I became reacquainted with nature’s darkness. Living in Southern California, traveling
across the county, especially to places that require a change of plane to
access, arriving on time is iffy at best.
I arose, that morning, before
sunrise to arrive at LAX in time to watch the sky brighten to daylight, I had
every hope of arriving in Connecticut in the late afternoon, to drive to the
Berkshires during daylight hours. But,
as any frequent traveler will tell you and as the poet Robert Burns said so
well “ The best laid schemes o'
mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry] And “gang a-gley” was a good description of my day. As we were nearing Midway airport in Chicago, the pilot came onto the intercom to announce that there were thunderstorms in the area and caution us that we might be diverted to Indianapolis. “Indianapolis” I thought “How am I to get to Hartford from Indianapolis?” Fortunately for our plane load, we touched down in Chicago just moments before the storm struck. As I arrived at my departure gate, just a few steps down from my arrival gate, I looked out the window, to check to see if my plane had landed, to find that it was dark as night outside that window at midday and that rain was coming down in sheets. Thunder could be clearly heard, even over the din of passengers sitting at our gate, and those walking up and down the hallways and frequent announcements over the loudspeaker system. Several flashes of lightening were to be seen hitting the ground not far from where I was sitting. The storm lasted only about half an hour, but it was enough to disrupt anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be passing through Midway airport that afternoon. A series of events, my departure flight having “mechanical difficulties” and the replacement plane having been diverted to Omaha, caused my departure from Chicago to be delayed by four hours. I was lucky that it was a mere four hours. That delay would mean that instead of my arrival in Hartford at 4:40 p.m., I would and did arrive closer to 8:30 p.m. It also meant that the drive to a town I had not been in, for more than ten years, to an address I had never experienced would made a bit more challenging due to the hour of night. I did not know, but should have anticipated the fact that the teeny tiny almost non-town of Canaan. New York, would prove to be one of the darkest places that I had experienced in more than a decade. Having driven from my previous home in Branford Connecticut to my daughter’s “country house” in Canaan, from the time that my granddaughter was born, until my daughter’s move to Southern California a period of nearly six years, I was certain that I knew the way to Canaan from Bradley International Airport. Hadn’t we driven by the airport exit on our way to Canaan every time we made the trek? And we had made that two hour trek more than twice a month, Spring, Summer and Fall. I was right I did remember it really well, until I turned from Route 295 onto Canaan Road. Suddenly, I was in a pitch black place. There were no street lights, street markers were impossible to read, and all of the familiar landmarks had gone out of business. And to top it all off, the GPS that came with my rental car was behaving strangely; it seemed to think that it was about five miles behind where I really was. So, in order to find the turn off, which in the end turned out as hard to find in broad daylight as in pitch black night, I could not rely on any help at all from the electronic voice. I drove to where I thought that the Canaan Market had been, my turnoff to our meeting place, and there was no market and hardly a sign that the market had ever been there, something I was to learn much later during a day-time drive. That night I just kept driving looking for my landmark. Several miles, I don’t know how many, I passed a building that looked as if it could have been the Canaan Market and a woman sitting on her front porch told me that I had gone much too far, the restaurant on the lake that I was looking for, was back the way I had come. So I turned around and went back, but still could not find my turnoff. My sense of how many miles I had traveled was skewed by my feeling of helplessness. I tried to find another human being to ask, but all of the places I passed were locked up tight with little or no lights to even identify them as businesses. Needless to say, I was becoming less and less my rational, sane happy self, in fact my frustration was mounting in spite of my attempts to remain calm, and tell myself that this was after all a very small community and I knew that the streets I was searching for, both of them, at that point either of them would have sufficed, went off the one I was traveling.
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry] And “gang a-gley” was a good description of my day. As we were nearing Midway airport in Chicago, the pilot came onto the intercom to announce that there were thunderstorms in the area and caution us that we might be diverted to Indianapolis. “Indianapolis” I thought “How am I to get to Hartford from Indianapolis?” Fortunately for our plane load, we touched down in Chicago just moments before the storm struck. As I arrived at my departure gate, just a few steps down from my arrival gate, I looked out the window, to check to see if my plane had landed, to find that it was dark as night outside that window at midday and that rain was coming down in sheets. Thunder could be clearly heard, even over the din of passengers sitting at our gate, and those walking up and down the hallways and frequent announcements over the loudspeaker system. Several flashes of lightening were to be seen hitting the ground not far from where I was sitting. The storm lasted only about half an hour, but it was enough to disrupt anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be passing through Midway airport that afternoon. A series of events, my departure flight having “mechanical difficulties” and the replacement plane having been diverted to Omaha, caused my departure from Chicago to be delayed by four hours. I was lucky that it was a mere four hours. That delay would mean that instead of my arrival in Hartford at 4:40 p.m., I would and did arrive closer to 8:30 p.m. It also meant that the drive to a town I had not been in, for more than ten years, to an address I had never experienced would made a bit more challenging due to the hour of night. I did not know, but should have anticipated the fact that the teeny tiny almost non-town of Canaan. New York, would prove to be one of the darkest places that I had experienced in more than a decade. Having driven from my previous home in Branford Connecticut to my daughter’s “country house” in Canaan, from the time that my granddaughter was born, until my daughter’s move to Southern California a period of nearly six years, I was certain that I knew the way to Canaan from Bradley International Airport. Hadn’t we driven by the airport exit on our way to Canaan every time we made the trek? And we had made that two hour trek more than twice a month, Spring, Summer and Fall. I was right I did remember it really well, until I turned from Route 295 onto Canaan Road. Suddenly, I was in a pitch black place. There were no street lights, street markers were impossible to read, and all of the familiar landmarks had gone out of business. And to top it all off, the GPS that came with my rental car was behaving strangely; it seemed to think that it was about five miles behind where I really was. So, in order to find the turn off, which in the end turned out as hard to find in broad daylight as in pitch black night, I could not rely on any help at all from the electronic voice. I drove to where I thought that the Canaan Market had been, my turnoff to our meeting place, and there was no market and hardly a sign that the market had ever been there, something I was to learn much later during a day-time drive. That night I just kept driving looking for my landmark. Several miles, I don’t know how many, I passed a building that looked as if it could have been the Canaan Market and a woman sitting on her front porch told me that I had gone much too far, the restaurant on the lake that I was looking for, was back the way I had come. So I turned around and went back, but still could not find my turnoff. My sense of how many miles I had traveled was skewed by my feeling of helplessness. I tried to find another human being to ask, but all of the places I passed were locked up tight with little or no lights to even identify them as businesses. Needless to say, I was becoming less and less my rational, sane happy self, in fact my frustration was mounting in spite of my attempts to remain calm, and tell myself that this was after all a very small community and I knew that the streets I was searching for, both of them, at that point either of them would have sufficed, went off the one I was traveling.
On the second
pass, after I had driven by Canaan Town Hall the second time, knowing I had
gone much too far, I pulled over and pulled out my cell phone. So, happy to find that I had bars I almost
cried with relief. My daughter and her
family had gone into Lennox to visit my sister and niece without me, after my
plane delay, and they were planning to wait for me at their cottage. I called to find that they were still en
route back to Canaan.. My frustration was obvious in my voice and my daughter
kept telling me to calm down, they would find me. Losing service twice, we finally decided that
I would drive back to the last lighted landmark, the traffic light at Route
295. When I finally got myself back to
there, they were waiting for me. We all
got out of our cars. Happy to see
familiar, loving faces, I handed my son-in-law my keys and got into the
passenger seat. Driving to the cottage,
I realized I had driven miles beyond the turnoff, the street was much closer
than Mapquest or my errant GPS were telling me.
I also realized that in that pitch black darkness of this heavily wooded
town, I might just as easily have driven right by the turnoff had I arrived
during daylight hours. The unpaved road
down the edge of the lake, would also have been hard for me to navigate in the
best of circumstances. Even the written directions about how to identify which
house were obscure at best. But the
darkness, the oddity of such complete darkness even given car headlights, was
the source of my defeat.
In the week that I spent in that quiet lakeside
cottage, I grew to love the darkness, to savor the quiet and appreciate stars
that I do not remember seeing since childhood at camp in the Maine woods. Darkness
became a friend once I had myself anchored to a location. It created a sense of peacefulness that is
hard to come by in our busy urban lives.
On the last two days of my visit, people came to inhabit the other
cottages around the lake, they turned on the outside lights, they light fires
in fire pits, and they talked and drank late into the night. But, upon waking in the wee hours of the
morning, to answer the call of nature, I could look out the window and see and
appreciate the darkness once again.
My next trip to
the east coast took me back to the community I had lived in before moving to
California. Here I again experienced
darkness. This time the roads, through
the woods, dark as they were, were my friends.
I knew these roads, had driven them in all kinds of weather. Traversing them during daytime hours, I
savored the dark deep shadows cast by the heavy stands of trees, and passing
through them during the night, I enjoyed the shadows cast by my headlights,
even driving in rain over snow-pocked
potholes, and around curves and over hills.
The darkness, even the daytime darkness is what I grew up with, what I
have experienced for most of my life. I
love the large dark trees, I love the sensation of mystery in the
underbrush. For me, this is
familiar. Where I live now, the only way
to experience the beauty of such darkness is to travel back to the places where
it is the norm. And I need to add, that
in spite of my sense of being lost, my fear and frustration during that night
in early July, I loved being surrounded by all of those trees and all of that
darkness.
Darkness is such a metaphor, for mystery, for evil, for the obscure and misunderstood. Darkness of many can be frightening. But in our modern world, a place lit at night, it is hard to find the kind of darkness that allows for peace, allows for quiet, and encourages one's mind to wander freely. I savor my trips into the woodsy darkness of my summer travels, smiling even now, as I taste the feeling of wonder as I see a true night sky.
