Night is a different dark now from the one I knew as a child. Walking off into it from my parents' porch, there are so many lights now: from the car-lot up the road, and the outlet-mall the other way, that the stars no longer reach me as they once would have. Weird lights are cast through the pines and cross the lawn at unlikely angles. More headlights than I ever remember crest the hill and flash by either way at all hours. And yet, even with the traffic at night, it still sounds as it always has here in summer-time. Just behind my parents' house, the wetlands and the woods still hum with insects and frogs and birds. In the gloaming bats still circle after lighting bugs and mosquitoes, and at night there are still owls in the trees and every manner of waking, moving thing in the reeds and coming up to the barn to eat the few things; pumpkins, peas, and beans, that my father still plants in a desultory way by the fence.
The night here is still, if anything, far noisier than the day, and even with the strange lights, darker than any I might ever know in the city.
Sitting on the swing in the yard with the grass wet under my feet, I can't help but marvel at what is unchanging about this place. My parents grow older each visit home, as do we all I suppose, though one sees it more in the old people than one does elsewhere. All around them the worst sort of commercial development continues apace and soon even that which is most familiar here will go.
Looking across the road to the high black trees, I think about how old they are, how seemingly indestructible, even as the circling lights come closer and closer. I am reminded of how we who choose to live in places of greater convenience and population now worry about the fragility of the natural world and all that's in it that is threatened by our need of new spaces, wider roads, more and more and ever more of what makes a place less like this and less, come to that, altogether. We quite rightly protect what we can and of course do not do enough, but we are aware now at least of something of the damage we have done and do and we try, most of us, to do less harm than we might.
But walking up the road from my parents' house, past the last tree, up to where the gas stations and the fast food starts, I'm more struck by the fragility of all that's been built than by the land around it. So little of what I see suggests even the possibility of permanence. The road that dead-ends just up at the first stop-light, the road on which I learned to ride a bike, where I first kissed a boy, is all but gone under a canopy of weeds and dock and thin new trees. I can walk but just so far down that road now without being brushed on either side in the dark by a thousand sprays of what would, left to itself, soon enough cover even the last bits of cool pavement under my feet. I am reminded, coming back, how easily a man might be lost at the end of such a road, how little missed, should no one come after to find him.
Every glowing sign, every bright light, might go out as easily as they came on. Every passing truck, every person now sleeping in every one of the six motels that have been built along this road just to accommodate the Canadians down from Ontario to shop in the outlet-mall, all of this and everyone in it, might just as easily fall as even the oldest of the trees that have been here for more than a hundred years.
I wonder then, out alone in the dark, as I wander the road I walked so many nights as a child without need of so much as a flashlight to find my way, not that we as a species should still be so little concerned to keep the night dark and full of life, but that we are not more awed to find ourselves still here, still tolerated in all our boisterous, destructive, unthinking proliferation and exuberance. I wonder that the night hasn't swallowed us up in the dark, that we haven't yet wandered out into the weeds and disappeared.
When my parents cease to be some day and I never come back again to walk this road at night, I wonder there will be a trace of any of us having been here. In all likelihood, the relentless development that has already consumed the fields and forests I knew here as a child will spread down over the hill, the lights from a hundred businesses will wipe the last star off the night sky above where I've been tonight. But is it not just as likely that someday, one hopes, well after I am no better remembered than the people still here now, the night will come back and reclaim everything under the pavement? It is my own fragility, and the fragility of even the memory of someone like me, that makes me shiver a bit, even in the heat.
As I pass back through the pines my father planted fifty years ago -- trees now taller than the little house I return to -- I am glad of the little light left on for me on the porch. That is the familiar light that dispels the larger thoughts that darkened my walk. Inside, in that small light, are all I know and love of this place. When that goes out, I leave this all, good and bad, natural and man made, to struggle or abide without me. Tonight, I just wish the whole place peace.
I do not want more change here before I stop coming back. That's the truth of it. Really I think no further than that. My concern in the end is as selfish as that. Let this last awhile longer. If I were to pray, that would, I think, be all I would actually ask. Let this last so long as they do. Let this last just so long as that.
That's a small way of seeing in the dark, isn't it? But there it is.
But I do wonder, for just a minute as I wipe the wet from my feet, if my nephews, visiting from Texas, might not have lit the last fireworks that will light up a night like this, before the light, or the dark, takes the whole.
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