Darkness

At the camps I went to growing up one of the evening activities was a Night Hike and one of the Night Hike activities was a Solo Hike. You'd be out in the woods at night and at some point one of the two counselors would go down the trail alone for 5-10 minutes and wait. Then each of the campers, one at a time, would traverse that distance alone. Most of the time everyone had flashlights and the counselors would say you could use it or not, suggesting you didn't.

The first time I did it I was 8 and I used my flashlight. All I can remember is fear. That something would pop out of the dark, that someone was waiting to scare me, the night itself, the unknown. The fear was near overwhelming but I plowed ahead and finished. There was a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I had overcome.

The next year I used my flashlight again and it was anticlimactic. The fear had mostly gone, and using it seemed like a cheat, a slight, untrusting. The next year I didn't use my flashlight and that changed everything.

Without the tunnel of my light the night opened, as I slowly walked down the path my eyes adjusted, the moon and stars cast dappled shadows through the trees, it wasn't bright but I could see. The path stretching ahead of me like a washed out ribbon, the woods cornucopic shades of blue-to-black with only patches of true dark where the woods got dense. And it was alive. The leaves rustled, the insects hummed, and occasionally the scrambling of some small creature would bubble up. But nothing threatening, nothing amiss. It struck me, walking alone through the night, this is as it should be, this was right. It thrilled, this trusting of the dark, and I was rewarded.

It became the thing I looked forward to the most, as a camper and then later as a counselor, later still I would sneak into parks after dark with my friends and lead them only by the shadowed moon as we drank or smoked and sometimes tripped. I reveled in it, it was gloriously freeing, the dark.

Some campers hated it, too terrified of the night, too unaccustomed or discomforted with being truly alone however briefly, of the silent noise of the forest unbroken by any voice. But I knew solitude from an early age, had grown up with it, acquired a taste for its bitterness. I realized on that first hike without my light that the darkness wasn't bad, it was simply different. My fear was mostly, if not entirely, in my own mind, of my own creation. The woods, night or day, if paid the proper respect, was benign. And come evening, particularly, when the shadows closed and the world shrank, it was actually comforting, intimate. I became at home in the dark.

As you grow up you realize that darkness isn't always visual, beyond the monster under the bed or in the bushes there are scarier things, normal things that are just part of life. Death, heartbreak, grief. They can be difficult to deal with, overwhelming. And I have no monopoly on healthy processing or satisfying answers to any of life's mysterious cruelties but I do know the dark. Darkness has been a friend for a long time, and I know that it is not good or bad, it simply is. Day and night, life and death, there is a balance to things. It may not make it easier to handle challenges or weather tragedies but I accept them, I don't deny them, I am not surprised when they occur. They are as natural as the forest at night.