I've Chosen Darkness
On not moving to NZ for the highway noise
We’ve started reading The Hobbit to the kids at night. Last night we read the chapter where our heroes are lost deep inside the Misty Mountains, the one where Bilbo meets Gollum and finds the ring. Ran us long past bedtime, it did, but you never break a classic scene halfway through. I did the Gollum voice, same as my father did for my sister and I one night last century. Time curled in a circle. Outside the clouds sank into pink. My son lay on the couch, and my daughter sat on the floor drawing a board game she’d designed. Bilbo was fleeing now, Gollum shrieking in pursuit. My daughter stopped us to check the visuals: “Is it still totally dark?”
Yesss, my preciousss. That’s the way it is, inside a mountain. She hasn’t seen the dark in weeks now. Like scientists in the Arctic the kids won’t see night again until March, or even April, barring the odd sleepover madness or camping trip. I will, though. After a winter wilting in the long nights, I long for the summer dark. When the kids went down I took a walk. Through their bedroom windows—open for air, curtains drawn against the light—they could surely hear my feet crunch on the gravel drive. I hope the sound came as both comfort and mystery. That’s what I’m after, anyhow. No headphones: the birds were still singing. Time your stroll right and you’ll leave the house in full evensong and catch the sudden hush halfway home. Back on November 4, bird bedtime fell so hard at 8:41 p.m. I had to run home and write it down. Last night, though, the breeze unsettled the curfew. Half the aviary seemed restless, the other half beat. By just after nine, though, the quiet had come.
There was no moon, or only a sliver that ducked quickly behind the garage. It was the first real muggy day and the stars were slow. Highway 2 was restless. Its two lanes run just one house away from our bedroom. Nights I imagine all its traffic heading south to the city, just to keep that fixed arrow in my head. I grew up by a freeway, as we call ‘em over there, and freeway noise has no such direction. Delillo nails that empty whoosh: “dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.”1 No nine words of lit are more polished in my memory. Dead never seemed right, though. At sixteen, alone in my dad’s Volvo Turbo, that new freeway felt like life itself. But when you’re inside the car, the noise is just proof of motion. When you’re standing still, in the backyard, at the edge of the place you call home, that’s when it turns to dream-edging babble. A British friend here, on the quieter edge of town: “I didn’t move to New Zealand to hear highway noise.” I nodded. We are Kiwi country squires now, he and I. And yet here I am, out back in a camping chair, waiting for the traffic to sleep like the birds.
I could’ve picked a clearer night to write about, honestly. On Monday I saw the Milky Way, or was it Tuesday? I should keep better notes. A poet friend of mine here in the Wairarapa2—an American, as it happens—once told me she makes a habit of stepping outside every night just before bed. Summer, winter, no matter. If we discussed why, I don’t remember. One doesn’t look to poets for reasons. I am lately trying to adopt the practice myself. Three doors I open now, to check: sleeping son, sleeping daughter, night. The habit is setting in and nights I forget I’ll rush to the stoop in my pajamas. Last night’s check was just after ten. The wind was still up. Hollyhocks bobbed like drunks. Swim togs spun on the line. The high clouds were thinning out but the stars were still photos on a finger-smudged phone, and the highway was cranking away.
I came back inside unsatisfied. The ritual alone should be enough. It takes all kinds of nights to make a life! But the wind only amps up the siren song of a dad’s late and uncaptured hours. I read a little, played a little bad guitar. Met Service told me the westerly would roll til dawn, and I walked the dark house securing windows and doors. Windows closed in front so the neighborhood tom won’t jump in again. Windows open in the bedrooms, always. In New Zealand I have become a fiend for the night air. Let the westerly lift the curtains and curl over our sleeping heads! Doors, though: shut ‘em tight, every one, lest they swing all night. I should sleep, I should sleep. The dawn chorus will wake us soon enough.
But then comes eleven. True night. The wind drops suddenly, as if by prearranged sign, and back outside I go. No cars. Eleven is highway 2’s bedtime. Nothing moving there now but a fat moth flying loops under the yellow streetlight. The stillness is complete. A leaf falls to the earth and I hear it land. The neighbors’ hall clock chimes the quarter hour. That’s it. There is no other sound. No freeway babble, no city rumble, no sleepless army of AC units. No sad, thin thunder of a passing jet. The sky’s blown half clear now and the stars are damn near singing. Orion’s cartwheeling over the roof. The Southern Cross, too—how I love to type its name. There’s still a smudge of starless black on the Tararuas, to the west from whence our weather comes. The wind will return, no doubt. If it blows all night there’ll be Milky Way for sure.
I can’t wait up. You can’t live in that stillness forever. I know the theory here. I am outside in the silent dark just to know the silent dark is there. But how long do you stand there, to make it stick? I should get a jumper, maybe. The air stirs, and the weed tree by the fence begins to whisper. I hear one big truck, rolling south. One soul, alive, speaking a single word as it flees for the hill. //
White Noise, of course. Right at the start.
I absolutely love how open you are to it all. All of it. Gorgeous post, Dan
Oh. My. I know that night, that stillness. You have written it down. Thank you.