They are not the same, the world of day and that of night. The first is one of “becoming,” of fruition, and we humans are merely sentient chips borne upon the tides of progress. In the light of day, we see things as they are, we think, believe that our world is no more complex than required. Secure in our convictions, we teach our perceived version of the world to our children, thereby perpetuating society’s shared version of “reality.” And so, it continues, generation after generation, each in thrall to an interpretation, a speculative theory which some would label a collective delusion.
But those of us familiar with the night have a different explanation. We know that the world is not as it appears – except when it is – and even then we have our doubts. We plumb its mysteries by reading Hindu cosmology, Zen Buddhist doctrine, quantum physics theory, mysticism, and comparative religions. We consult doctors and preachers and scientists alike; hear great argument pro and con, but exit unfulfilled from the same door wherein we entered.
Meanwhile, the night remains self-contained, complete as is, an all-knowing eye contemplating itself. And all that we, its guests, can do, is to stare right back, and in effect, observe ourselves.
I was an atypical child, a self-content loner without fear of the dark. Country-born-and-raised, I knew the different species of owls by their calls before I could spell their names. My only night light was the moon, and I was lulled to sleep in season by the mournful cries of whippoorwills, the insistent piping of tree frogs, and the wistful “farewell to summer” duet of katydids and crickets. In winter, the singers and their repertoires in abeyance, I nodded off to the soothing gurgle of my bedroom radiator. The night had many voices, was always in key, and asked no admission fee to its concerts. And lucky me possessed a front row seat.
The front of our two-story, stucco-over-stone farmhouse was shaded by a roofed porch, with two wooden swings at either end. I adopted the righthand one as my own, sitting alone on pleasant summer evenings to listen to the guttural kerumphs of bullfrogs, their grumbles as regular as a metronome. Teeming squadrons of lightning bugs drifted amidst the gossamer banks of mist along the pasture creek. In the moonlight, all lay drained of color, like a photograph negative whose former richness had fled with the setting sun.
My ears ignored the occasional bursts of canned laughter leaking through the screened living room window; they were attuned to gentler vibrations. Thus endowed with keener perception, I experienced my first taste of altered reality.
Disregarding my parents’ warning of imminent electrocution, I stubbornly assumed my favorite swing during thunderstorms, blinking from the chill spatter of wind-driven rain, while thrilling to the strobe-flash-crash of lightning strikes, each bolt briefly revealing a distorted view of my familiar universe, reducing the pallid lumps of huddled sheep to here-and-gone glimpses of their tenuous existence. For my apprenticeship as a student of the unknown, nature provided twelve-year-old me with my first koans.
Although I lacked the philosophical language to explain my misgivings, I sensed early on that the world wasn’t quite as it appeared, that in fact it was brimming with secrets. A decade before my first exposure to Zen, I was aware of the world’s duplicity, perceived its beguiling art of camouflage, its chameleonic nature. Confronted with constant reminders of life’s here-and-gone frailty, coupled with its never-say-die tenacity, my sensitivity swung in turn around the nether poles of positive and negative, life and death, night and day. Hungry for answers, thirsting for knowledge, I was chagrined to discover that the more I learned, the less I understood. The dichotomy between the daytime world and that of the night, I sensed, was the key to the enigma.
Four of my mother’s sisters and one of her two brothers lived in the Phoenixville area, more than twenty miles from our farm. At least twice a month, against my will, I was dragged along for day-long Sunday visits. Returning home in the dark, we often passed a stone memorial to the local servicemen who had died in either world war. Situated in a small, grassy island in the center of an intersection, the simple marble cenotaph was illuminated by a lone floodlight. If my father, a decorated medic in General Patton’s Third Army, ever felt a twinge of empathy upon passing it, he hid it well, never remarking upon its existence. But for some unfathomable reason, the monument elicited a frisson of compassion from me, an unexplainable affection for what, I would later learn, Buddhists term an object’s “suchness.” It was what it was, not a whit more or less, perfectly at one with its purpose. Most of the inscribed names were now forgotten, the men’s futures rudely terminated, their potential condensed into several lines of unread praise. But at night, in the quiet, uncritical night, their abbreviated lives were redeemed; each had lived just long enough to fulfill his destiny, and not a moment longer. They and the unassuming stone marker that honored their deaths, simply “were,” as was I, and my parents, too, as well as everything in existence. My demanding yet considerate tutor, the night, had taught me that.
As befitting a country boy, I naturally assumed country ways. When I learned that money was swimming in our creek and swamp – muskrat hides brought a half-dollar or more – I pestered my father until he bought me a dozen muskrat traps. After cutting an armload of dogwood stakes, and getting a brief tutorial from an older boy who didn’t know much more than clueless me, I strung a modest trapline along our pasture creek, one I could check in fifteen minutes.
As my skill increased with each successive season, I expanded my target furbearers to include raccoon and mink, lengthening my ‘line to a mile out and back, which I ran before dawn. Although I never earned more than pocket money, there were other rewards, all bestowed by my old pal, the night.
From opening day on Thanksgiving, to season’s end in late January, I trod the creek banks, flashlight in hand. Except for the rustling of my passage, the sloshing of my boots, the world lay still, as if holding its breath, all sensation in dormancy. Here and there, in promising locations, lay the traps, their lethality belied by their simplicity, the round jaws and trip pan as patient as fate.
My parents mocked my labors, considered me foolish, dared me to calculate my profits after deducting the cost of my traps and the flashlight batteries. And what about the hours spent in the cold and rain, they taunted, knowing that I wasn’t even earning enough to match the current $1.15 an hour minimum wage. But they were children of the Great Depression, obsessed with money, prosaic philistines immune to the wonders of nature. Neither had gazed at the ceaseless boiling in a sandy spring bottom as the wee capillaries and cryptic veins of the earth discharged their consignments, nor had either ever fallen captive to the endless murmur of a calamus-ringed waterfall or listened to the soul-soothing repertoire of nature. And they had most certainly never allowed themselves to be transported to the magical realm of the naiades, the irrepressible spirits of the creeks and wetlands.
As I aged, became steeped in the essence of nature, I understood why the mountain men had remained in the Rockies long after the beaver were gone, knew why I had slogged through snow and rain and bitter cold every winter morning, racking up mile after mile before breakfast. But how could I explain to heretics that Mother Nature and her silent henchman, the night, had thoroughly bewitched me?
Our 123-acre farm abutted the 3000-acre Geiersburg watershed; its vast, wooded expanse was crosshatched by various trails, an out-of-service pipeline right-of-way, old Indian footpaths, and an everchanging web of deer trails. The two small brooks that merged as one in our pasture sprang from two widely separated hillside springs on the reservoir’s southern rim. On overnight camping trips, my friends and I filled our canteens with the ever-cold water, then used it to douse our morning cookfires.
One evening, as we spun harmless lies around our campfire, we spotted a worrisome flicker of light in the underbrush. Concerned that a wind-blown spark may have ignited a brushfire, we hastened to investigate, only to discover a shimmering patch of foxfire, an extremely rare phenomenon. Dutifully enthralled, we stood transfixed until it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Once again, Madame Night had conceived and delivered a marvel, only to withdraw it on a whim.
At times, the night probably chuckled in amusement as my same friends and I risked our necks to catch roosting barn pigeons, scaling rough-jointed stone walls, flashlights in our mouths, to earn a few quarters each. Destined for live pigeon shoots, the doomed creatures, hypnotized by our flashlights, offered little resistance as we stuffed them into gunny sacks. I opted to retire from the hazardous trade after surviving one too many hay-cushioned falls. But even so, I had to admit that I had plenty of fun while the business was afoot, the sort of fun unique to nocturnal country boys like us.
One memorable August night during the annual Perseid meteor shower, as we fished for catfish along the Schuylkill River, we watched with audible wonder as God shot Roman candles out His back door. From the opposite shore came the hollow booming of a great horned owl. Suddenly, it fell silent, allowing a choir of bullfrogs to show its chops. Then the dying shriek of a talon-pierced raccoon kit lifted the hairs of our necks. Apparently, the hungry owl had secured a midnight feast.
Hemlock-fringed Rattler Mountain looms above Morris, a tiny village in northern Pennsylvania. For several years in the mid-80s, I hunted bear and turkey atop its flattened brow, killing nothing but time, a quarry with no bag limits. Within the serrate throats of McCloskey and Tannery Hollows, I was privy to diverse marvels in both the day and night. An inquisitive bobcat once mistook the chirps from my cedar box call for the come-ons of an amorous hen turkey, stalking camouflaged me with steely intent, its incredibly large eyes burning into mine. Even after I waved and shouted, the disappointed suitor was reluctant to leave, slowly edging away, its sentient yellow eyes scorching my soul. Later, back at camp, a fellow hunter asked why I had not shot it. I shook my head in disgust; that act was unthinkable, obscene. Forty years later, those luminous eyes haunt me still; what should they have done had I dared to shoot them dull?
On other occasions, I encountered a large coyote whose husky stature betrayed its timber wolf genes, and – of all things – an enormous Russian boar rooting for acorns, a likely escapee from an area game farm. Although armed with serious firepower, I never so much as raised my weapon, for what manner of ingratiate would harm the issue of his spiritual benefactor? These unrelated creatures, as well as the rarely sighted goshawk I observed swooping through ice-laden rhododendrons one bitter December morning, its talons dangling ominously, were merely different aspects of the same phenomenon that had produced me, and to needlessly kill them would be akin to suicide.
Rattler Mountain was a personal place of power, home to ravens, the ever-curious emissaries from still and remote regions that remarked my intrusion into their solitary realm with raucous cries. To me, Rattler Mountain was a portal to an elder time, the ancient millennia before the advent of the pioneers, before the native Americans, even.
On a singular pre-dawn morning, as I walked to my stand, a few inches of newly fallen snow on the ground, a full moon slipped free of a cloud, bathing the forest with a cold but brilliant light. I paused, looked upwards at the madcap stars that seemed about to crash upon my head, gazed around in wonder at the transformed world that seemed at once strange but familiar. I expected a miracle, a prodigy to appear; an air of expectation prevailed. For a fleeting, foolish moment, I feared an alien abduction. Then, as suddenly as it had occurred, the spell was broken; once more, I stood within a frozen landscape, the silhouettes of every tree and boulder painted upon a virgin canvas by their moon shadows. Everything was just right, nothing out of place; an abiding sense of perfection obtained. Not a tree was too tall or short; none too thick or thin. Each stone lay just so, neither too massive nor too small. Every object fulfilled its duty as exactly as intended, and not a whit differently.
This is how Adam saw the world on the morning of his creation, I thought, what Gautama experienced at the instant of his enlightenment.
Then the jealous clouds obscured their darling once more, dimming its grandeur, and I reverted to a confused schmuck holding an unloaded rifle, wondering just what the hell I had just witnessed.
That brief but unforgettable theurgy occurred a lifetime ago; during that span, my three daughters have grown up to have children of their own. And now, forty years later, I’m just another old man obsessed with an old man’s thoughts of death; ready, yet not ready, to move on. If I’m lucky, I’ll eventually slip gently into that good night, the enigmatic night which has hinted throughout my life how much it loves me. God knows how much I loved it in return, and surely – no less than any of His creations – I will be accepted “as is” when I eventually pass over, for my lifelong tutor, the night, has promised me so.
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