Questions in the Dark

An Apostle Islands postcard

Only those who never venture beyond a lighted room would believe there are no shadows in the dark. They simply come in the form of questions.

Questions like “To what end?” What is it that I am doing on these darkest nights alone, walking the beach looking for …. what? Is it for the beauty? Is it for some kind of epiphany? What is it that I hope to get out of this search for a sense of place in these islands? For years I used to challenge my literature students when they encountered a character escaping in a short story or novel, to ask themselves not just what that character was running from but what it is that they thought they were running towards.

Now, years from teaching, alone in the dark, I might well ask myself the very same thing.

On some nights, the answer is simple: to be out there instead of in bed sleeping, to walk down a beach matching my strides to the drumbeat of waves on the lake or the sawing of the wind through the trees. On other nights, it is a kind of disappearing I seek, to come to know a stretch of beach so well, so intimately that I could lose myself completely and “finish my life disguised as a creek” as Jim Harrison once wrote. On those nights, I know just the place, just the creek, a curl of water shaped like a question, carrying light on its back easily, and sliding into the big lake with a sound like the earth itself saying “shhhhhhhh” and “shhhhhh” and “shhhhhhh” all night long in the dark.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).