The Dark Coast

To truly know the light, sometimes you need to embrace the dark.

The Little Dipper is securely anchored at the nameless beach and my feet already on the top rung of the swim ladder when I stop, stilled by something I can’t quite name. I stand motionless, listening.

Nothing. Pure dark, barely even the rustling threads of night wind, a few stars scratching the still blue-black sky.

I am about to continue, down the ladder for a night walk on the beach when I notice a strange wavering line stitched faintly in gray directly overhead. At first I imagine it to be wisps of northern lights but then there comes a faint sound, a quiet brushing of the air as if by wings. I imagine a cloud of bats or an unnatural gathering of owls. I think of talons, sharp beaks. There is a tightening in my stomach. My hands clench on the rails. There is something out there, something moving in the dark.

Ever since that first campfire lit at the mouth of our ancestral cave, humans have been prisoners of the light. Few of us feel completely comfortable outside the small circle illuminated by a campfire, a torch, a flashlight, or the blue-white glow of the television screen. The darkness has become a foreign country, an unexplored continent left to huge eyes, silent paws, unnamable shrieks, and the soft touch of whiskers in tight places. We have given up the night.

Humans are not built for the nocturnal life. Our eyes, which are relatively small in proportion to our skulls, for instance, have evolved with more cones to help us differentiate colors than rods which would help us see in low light conditions. The pupils of night creatures open more widely than human eyes and many creatures of the night have what is known as “tapetum lucidum” which is a reflective membrane that bounces light twice in their eyes doubling its effectiveness. We humans do not. We have chosen to dance in the daylight, picked the brightly-lit and colorful world of the sunlit hours over the ability to wander comfortably in the dark. The choice has given us many things of beauty and a sense of security but the gifts do not come without a cost.

Some of that cost can be measured in simple hours. Every place on earth averages about 12 hours of darkness a day over the course of a year. If we close ourselves off to a landscape in the dark, we lose half our time to come to know it. We limit ourselves by our unwillingness to cross the boundary of the darkness.

Some of the cost of closing ourselves off from the treasures of the night can be tallied in the loss of wonder and awe. To never know what it is to lie on your back in warm sand beneath stars that seem close enough to stir with your outstretched finger, to never feel the tug of excitement as a falling star zips across the horizon, to not know the weightlessness of the heart that comes over you beneath a sky gone wild with northern lights is an impoverishment of the soul.

In some ways, daytime world seems a barren country compared to the world after dark. An estimated 85 percent of the world’s mammals are night creatures or become most active during the “crepuscular” hours, the low-light of dusk and dawn. Night is the time of hunters too, which may account for a large share of the human fear of the dark, with some 60 percent of carnivores being nocturnal. Still, as if to assuage the cost we try to pretend that the night time is cold and empty, calling the depth of darkness the “dead of night.” But the darkness is very much alive. Writer W.H. Hudson used to like to play a trick on his dinner guests leading them out into the forest surrounding his estate and asking them to stand completely quiet for a time. When all was silent, he would slip a revolver out from under his coat and fire a round into the air setting off a frenzy of howls and shrieks from the surrounding but unseen night creatures. “The wild outcry,” he called it, “the extraordinary hullabaloo.”

I don’t need a “hullabaloo” or even a soul-stirring display of aurora every night. But I would like to cultivate a deeper connection with the world of darkness here in my chosen landscape of the Apostles. I wonder, could I save one island, one shoreline, as a place I come to only under the cover of darkness? Never seeing it in full daylight? It would become my own dark coast, a place I would know only by the powdery feel of birch bark beneath my fingers and the galumphing of dark waves in the hollow eyes of the sea caves. There would be the sound of loons perhaps, the pale shimmer of aurora, the sudden snap of a twig in the dark. There would come a humbleness too. In the dark, we are at a disadvantage to those half-heard footfalls in the forest with eyes that can see us even if we can’t see them, the growls and shrieks that say to our ears there are still places you cannot go.

It would never work. Perhaps it has been too long since we traded the secrets of the dark for the security of the light. But what would it mean to your sense of place to know one stretch of shoreline, one bay, one forest, as your own dark coast?

Back on the Little Dipper, I stand motionless a long time wondering what it is that is moving above me. Then, the answer comes to me faintly on the wind. A call so low that I have to wait to hear it again to be certain, a murmur really: a flock of geese calling to each other softly in the dark.

Many birds migrate at night — wood warblers, vireos, rails — to take full advantage of the daylight hours to feed, saving the darkness for traveling. I envy them, those creatures for whom the night forms no barrier, steering by the stars.

Smiling at my own lingering night-blind fears, I climb down the swim ladder and wade to shore. There, I will walk the beach to witness the rising daylight battle the darkness for control of the sky over the islands. There must be a metaphor in there somewhere but for now, it is enough just to be here, walking in the sand watching both sunrise and northern lights, the darkness and the light, grateful that there is still a time and a place in the world for both.

— Jeff Rennicke

(all photographs by Jeff Rennicke unless otherwise noted)

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