Rainy Night

If I were on a mountainside somewhere, exposed, with barely any shelter, and with no where to go, I probably would think rain like's tonight's rain--steady, sometimes breezy, sometimes heavy--sucks. But I'm not; I'm warm and safe and dry in my Harrisonburg house, with bebop jazz in the other room, my Smartwool-socked feet up on my desk, and all the windows open to the sound and scent of tonight's spring rain. 

Eight minutes after 11pm and I'm beginning to think about how good bed will feel. I'll sleep with the windows open, lying under flannel and down. Speaking of down, the temperature tonight is predicted to drop to around 50. Is this maybe the best sleeping weather ever? No, that may be in the desert west--I learned this in Albuquerque and was reminded in Reno--when you go to bed feeling warm and wake in the early morning hours to a temperature thirty degrees cooler than the one you knew before sleep. There's maybe nothing like being in an early morning bed, warm and safe and maybe not alone, while the desert breeze filters in through the screens. 

But tonight should be good. 

The only thing I don't like is living so close to Interstate 81 and having the relentless highway sound of rushing tires taking somebodies somewhere as quickly as possible. I usually sleep with a fan running, white noise, but maybe tonight I'll skip that and listen to rain.

I wrote last time about walking under the moon with Luna. Well, I'm thinking of walking in the rain with a puppy next fall. A couple weeks ago, I called a breeder outside Harrisonburg and told him I would be ready at the end of the summer. It will have been a year since saying goodbye to Luna, and I think I'll be ready. So I'm thinking about nights like this--wet, wet, wet nights with soggy ground and streets filled with worms--and walking with a puppy, beginning that relationship, one that will--I hope--include thousands of night walks, and years that will take me from my forties to my sixties. I still feel so loyal to Luna that it's hard to even imagine another dog. But waiting a year feels increasingly right to me--time to mourn, to miss her, to honor our years together.

It's something to imagine the future that awaits. The pup is supposed to be ready at the end of August, which means even now she (or he) is somewhere growing. Even now--imagine this--the dog that may spend 15 years as my companion is somewhere on this earth. I know we can't know what the future holds, but on a rainy night like this one where I am grateful for warmth and shelter, I am thinking of rainy nights to come, hoping there will be a new friend here to pull me out into the darkness.

Walking at night under a waxing gibbous

When my dog Luna was alive we would walk nearly every night before midnight. Luna was under voice control and hardly knew a leash during her 15-year life. We probably went for a thousand walks a year together, including one the night before she left this life. We would walk first thing in the morning, in the evening after work, and then, before bed, this walk before midnight. I loved walking with her anytime, but I especially loved these walks at night. 

I have always loved the way the world comes down in speed and size at night. Less noise, fewer cars, fewer people. I can feel myself exhale at night, as though I've been holding my breath all day, dealing with the stress of daily life. I have to believe it's been this way for countless people over the ages--night and its beautiful darkness give us the chance to exhale, to breathe out the day's worry and breathe in the night's calm. Before Luna came along, I had seldom walked at night, before midnight, getting out into the neighborhood.  Sometimes, but not regularly, not as a practice, a regular returning ritual, a set part of every day.

She would race across lawns, from house to house--even back behind the houses, finding who knows what, her birddog senses fully alive--then return to check in, make sure I was coming along. And I was, slowly, sauntering--these walks weren't about getting anywhere, or exercise. I'd just stroll along, down the sidewalk, down to the park, around the block. We seldom ran into other people. That's one thing you notice when you get out at night, how few of us are outside savoring this time. How we close our doors and shutter our windows, enclose ourselves in our boxes, watching our boxes. From windows in house after house, in whatever neighborhood we walked--Albuquerque, Reno, Ashland, Winston-Salem, Harrisonburg--glowed television's blue. Mostly, I loved this. I didn't want to see anyone. I loved having the night to myself, with my beautiful dog racing joyfully, twirling fallen leaves like a gust of wind as she crossed lawn after lawn.

But there was always a small twist of sadness, just seeing how few people were out. We know so little about night, about darkness--we ignore it, avoid it, fear it. And yet, it's so important to our lives. There were often nights so beautiful--a moon, a soft rain, huge snowflakes floating down--that I could not believe Luna and I were the only ones out.

Last night, all my shades were drawn. I watched a three-hour hockey game (my Minnesota Gophers in the NCAA championship), the blue glow of my television seeping out into the night. I was so cut off from the night outside--there could have been a herd of buffalo encircling my house, or... anything, really, and I would have had no idea. It was a night like most nights now--Luna gone eight months--where I lower my shades at dusk and don't go back outside. I suppose it's because I knew there were no buffalo encircling my house--or anything, really, out of the ordinary. It was just night. And with no Luna to get me out, I stay inside.

Except that last night I walked in my neighborhood before midnight. I changed into jeans, put on my hoody, laced my old running shoes--just as I used to when Luna used to come stand next to me wherever I was when it was time to walk--and just wait for me to take her out. Maybe it's because the Gophers had been beaten by a better team and I felt a little down. But maybe it's because I remembered that a waxing gibbous would be high overhead. 

And it was, that wonderful old moon, as it always has been. Around the block I strolled, remembering, soaking up the beautiful night. Breathing again, feeling connected--to my past, to the me I love, to this wonderful world. Luna with me, every step of the way.

Starry Nights Harrisonburg

Tonight we begin our week-long event Starry Nights Harrisonburg, an attempt to raise awareness of light pollution and its solutions here in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. My hope is that we will be incredibly successful, that dozens or even hundreds of people come out to the events, that we get national media coverage, that the Starry Nights idea spreads to other cities and towns, and that we get serious about halting and reducing light pollution here and everywhere. 

But there's only so much I can control, right? I can put this week together with the help of Shanil Virani, the director of the JMU Planetarium. I can do interviews and send emails and tweet photos of Alicia's dog Shadow reading The End of NIght. But in the end, what happens next is out of my hands.  Maybe no one will come to the events. Or more likely, maybe our elected officials will yawn and do nothing. And ten years from now--five years from now--light pollution will be even worse here, and everywhere.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac (1949) in which he wrote, "Once you gain an ecological education you live alone in a world of wounds."  It's a feeling I've often had, that I'm the only one who sees what we're doing to the beautiful world. And the feeling is real--and the evidence sometimes overwhelming--but the sentiment isn't true. I know that I am not alone. I know that plenty of other people care about this world. They might not immediately care about light pollution, but they will care if I connect with them. And I will care about their concerns if they help me connect. I'm sure of this.

I'm sure too that we don't need everyone in order to succeed.  I remember Paul Wellstone, at Carleton (he was my professor, and later became a US Senator before dying in a plane crash in November of 2002), telling us how during the Civil Rights Movement it wasn't as though everyone was in the streets--it was a few dedicated people leading the way. 

And so I will do what I can on behalf of darkness and especially on behalf of those creatures who depend on darkness. I've never really been an activist. But tonight I will begin. It feels good. It feels like being a little more alive. Yesterday, at a UU service, I admitted I "felt called" to do this.  I don't mean this in any heroic way. I just mean it.  I have no idea where it will take me. 

Full Moon

For as long as I can remember I have loved the moon. In fact, one of my first memories is of lying on my back in the snow holding my new Christmas telescope up to the moon. I was probably 7. But I remember so many moons since then. The last one I spent with my childhood dog, Shiner, in September. The one after Gail, a girl I was crazy for, broke up with me, in June. The moon over a bridge in Venice, Italy when I was backpacking through as an 18-year-old, in December. I never get tired of seeing the full moon. I love that it's the same moon that every human before me saw, that though we diminish its beauty with our pollution of light we haven't marred the moon--at least not that much--the way we have so much of the world's beauty. For as long as I can remember, the moon has drawn me out to stare up at its light.

I love that. I love that in all the change of life, especially the change brought by age, my reaction to the moon remains. I am as pulled to it, by it, at 47 as I was at 17 as I was at 7. And I'm growing confident that when I'm 87--if I am--that the moon and I will still share this pull.  I think of that Emerson quote about the stars, that if they came only one night in a thousand years how "men would believe and adore" and tell everyone what they'd seen... but the stars come out every night, so we ignore their beauty. (Of course, that was 1836. In our day, the stars really do not come out, and so most of us ignore their beauty for that reason.) Because the full moon comes only once a month, I think that helps with the pull. It doesn't come too often. Some months when it comes the clouds block its way. So I get to see it seldom enough that when it does come, like tonight, bright and clear and radiant, I'm drawn to sing its praise. 

Or whatever. I'm not singing. Just typing a few lines before bed, before sleeping through the rest of the night's beauty. But it always feels good to take a moment to acknowledge the moon, or whatever beauty the world offers. 

I remember a recent full moon, seven months ago, in August. It was the last full moon I had with Luna, my 15-year-old Brittany. We were up in northern Minnesota at our lake cabin. I took her out on the dock under the moon and sat down, bringing her onto my lap, holding her there. She was in her last days, and she was calm, curled in my lap, but still sniffing the midnight summer air, seeing life with her nose, life of which I could only guess. I have always had the sense when looking up at the full moon that the moon somehow connects me with friends in other places under this same moon as it shines down on wherever they are. I think that too about the moons of my past, this moon is those moons, shining down on those experiences, those friends--like my dog friend Luna--keeping them alive. 

Shopping for Lights at Home Depot

People often ask me what they can do to stop light pollution, and one easy answer is to only buy "dark sky friendly" lights for your house. By that I mean lights that are shielded so that they can only shine downward--not into the sky, into our eyes, into our neighbors' house. Unfortunately, buying shielded lights for your house is more difficult than it should be. Or rather, it is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay easier to buy unshielded lights.  

Yesterday at Home Depot, I counted 89 outdoor light fixtures. Of those, four were shielded.  When I was a teenager I was at the U of Minnesota football game where Nebraska beat the Gophers 84-13, and I got up and walked around during the second half because I was so depressed.  At Home Depot, the score was 85-4.  

Most of the 85 unshielded lights are what we call "brass and glass" fixtures, and we buy them because they look good during the day (i.e. on display at HD). But at night they spray light in all directions. Their designs are modeled after fixtures intended for much, much, much dimmer gaslight, rather than electric light. There do exist classic designs such as these but with no glass and with the lamp up inside the fixture so that light only goes downward. But Home Depot does not carry any of these.

Also, Home Depot (and Lowe's, and probably every other American home improvement story) continues to sell unshielded "security lights" that blast light in all directions from dusk to dawn. I saw no shielded "security lights" (some of my friends call them "insecurity lights").

The thing is, light at night is not the problem--the way we use light at night is the problem. Shooting light in all directions does not make any of us any safer, and in fact it contributes to making the night more dangerous by blinding us, casting shadows, and giving the ILLUSION of safety. Not to mention wasting a ton of energy and money.

I love working with the problem of light pollution because it is so within our grasp to solve. If we were to shield our lights, we would make a huge dent in the problem. But it sure would help if we had better choices when we went shopping for lights. 

Boarding school

So I'm in northern Connecticut at a boarding school packed with students from around the world. I visited three classes today and I gave a talk tonight. My sense? That most of these leaders of tomorrow haven't really thought about light at night... ever. That they've grown up swamped in artificial light and think that this is simply the way things are. That they haven't wondered if we could light the night differently. And in this, they reflect most of the people I meet. At least before I talk about the issue. Then, most people begin to think that yeah, it is dumb how we spray light in every direction--including into our eyes and into the sky.

But I think what I'm noticing most is that here, in the northern part of the state, in an area that is still fairly dark, the night still doesn't seem like something about which the students have thought much.  They live their nights inside, in the light, and at 10pm they are expected to be inside their dorms until morning. Night--that is, natural dark night--just isn't part of their daily life. Of course it's cold outside, and of course I forgot my coat in Virginia, and of course it's supposed to be about 18 degrees here tomorrow, but oh well.

I just wonder when it's warmer if anything changes. If any of these bright and ambitious students spend time walking in the darkness, staring up at the stars, wondering where their life will lead. I bet some do. But what if all of them did, and if at this $50k/year school this was part of their education?

Corn and light in New Mexico.

Back in Albuquerque for a conference.  On a panel today with my good friend Douglas Haynes from U of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.  He will be talking about corn, and I will be talking about light pollution. You wouldn't immediately put the two together, but when you think about it, we have replaced the natural order of things with these two bland monocultures of corn and light.  And not that corn and light are without value--of course not--but when that's essentially all we have for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles, something's out of balance.  So we'll be making those connections this morning.  

And then, we'll get started eating green chile.  

Audiobook

Audiobook! Paul recently finished recording the audiobook version of The End of Night. Stay tuned for news about the release date.