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Night Life
After dark, a different sort of crowd takes over. They come down from the mountains or out of the bushes or up from underground. Hidden from view by the cover of darkness, they infiltrate every road and meadow and damp soggy place; they claim backyards, too, and city streets. I'm not talking just of evenings, but after midnight and well into the early hours of the morning, and those long hours just before dawn when it seems the sun will never rise. Most animals make their rounds at these times and go about the business of eating and procreating and dying. Diurnal, or daytime living, is a minority view. I've been out in the dark hours recently, inspired by Diana Kappel-Smith's fine book, "Night Life: Nature from Dusk to Dawn". I take advantage of the week of nights before and after the full moon. In its waxing and waning glow I'm able to pick my way along familiar trails beside the river. The routes are the same, but the look of the place is foreign in the eery lunar light. Kappel-Smith went out into the night, she says, to find what wildlife was lurking about and what it was doing. In a two-year period she visited fiver very different places with separate communities of nocturnal creatures: the Chihuahuan desert of Arizona, the badlands of North Dakota, a coral reef off the Hawaiian shore, suburban Connecticut, the swamps of Louisiana. "The human eye is a wonderful thing," she explains. "Decrease the light level one-hundred-thousand-fold... and give your eyes half an hour to fool around, and you'll see things as well as you ever did. In black and white maybe, and fuzzily, but well enough." She's right about eyesight, mine anyway. Assisted by soft moonlight, I could see overhanging branches in time to duck and could pick out rocks in the streambeds I stepped across. Little mice and shrews were the furry shapes that skittered across my path. Owls and bats and nighthawks passed by overhead. Kappel-Smith shared her nights with spadefoot toads during a rare desert rainstorm, with coyotes on the Northern plains, with octopi in the ocean, and with Eastern screech owls in her own backyard. Mine were spent with a pair of elk I spooked from their grazing, a coyote that zigzagged up the trail ahead of me, something long and furry that sliced through the low-lying brush (weasel? ferret?), and a skunk I warily backed away from. Though I could see my way well enough, I still walked the trail slowly, tenderly. I would not trust the shadows to be free of holes or boulders or coiled snakes. But the more I lingered in the dark, the greater my confidence became. I started to anticipate what lay around the next bend or across the creek, as if a forgotten sense started to kick in after the lights went out. Perhaps man, too, has his nocturnal side. As creatures of the light, though, we commonly give little thought to life in the darkness. Like the back side of the moon, it lies hidden and unknown and rarely considered. "Night Life" is an effective reminder that the greater portion of living things prefer the gloom we shun. "The night of the planet and the night of the soul are not so different," says Kappel-Smith. "To the dark we've banished our ghouls and our crimes and our dreams and our terrors and our gods, because they are elusive, though they are everywhere." We have penetrated the deepest jungles, braved the worst Arctic winters and scaled every mountain on this earth. But we have yet to fully explore the dark mysteries of our own backyard at night. _______ by Michael Hofferber Copyright © 1997 Outrider. All rights reserved. |
Rural Delivery Commentaries and advice on rural living by Michael Hofferber Visit the Rural Delivery Blog 
 
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