Phantom

"Night-time sharpens, heightens each sensation.
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.
Silently the senses abandon their defenses.
Slowly, gently night unfurls its splendor . . ."

-- Andrew Lloyd Weber – "Music of the Night"

"People are messy," Jeff, a friend from my last assignment, used to say.  Usually it was over coffee in the DFAC (that's military-ese for "dining facility" which is a cafeteria in English – everything has an acronym in the military) when I was complaining to him about some latest round of personnel issues I was dealing with. 

I think that's a great observation about life with people in general – not just at work.  Jeff was right - people are messy.  And when Jeff said messy, he didn't mean unclean or untidy – though that certainly applies to a good many.  Heck – it applies to me.  You'd know what I was saying if you ever saw my desk.  What he was talking about was the complexity of social interaction.  People make a mess of relationships, and since relationships are pretty much everything, then logically, people make a mess of pretty much everything (A=B, B=C, then A=C – you get the idea).

I have always had a fondness for walking at night.  When I was younger I would often wait until everyone else was in bed, then wander out the back door and out into the town.  My parents lived in a small city in western New Hampshire.  Main Street was just a little more than a mile from our house.  I would walk down Court Street, passing all the old houses that had once been the residences of mill bosses in the 19^th century.  These were sometimes graceful Victorians, but always imposingly large.  When you passed the new court house – very much 20^th century office building box architecture – you were on Main Street.

At the top of Main Street was (still is) a classic white church.  In front of the church, a rotary, complete with rotunda where bands sometimes played summer concerts, fountain, and obligatory war memorial of someone on a horse from some war a long time ago. 

By midnight, Main Street was mostly deserted.  The traffic lights switch to blinking red or yellow, depending on which way you are passing through the intersections and the rotary.  Occasionally there would still be a few pick-up trucks parked along the median, redneck hicks in from the surrounding unpopulated areas not wanting to call it a night just yet.  They would have cans of Bud held low against passing cars – in case.  But passing cars were few and far between.  Mostly the streets were quiet.  Any noise penetrated farther at night.  The unsubtle drunk laughter.  The sound of tires coursing over the pavement as a car turned a corner and the tail lights disappeared from sight.  The hum of air conditioners sputtering on or off.  The sound of your own footsteps on the pavement.

I'd walk along Main Street, looking at my reflection in the darkened shop windows.  The emptiness was peaceful, in an almost mischievous way.  The yellow light of street lamps was almost like a mild rebuke – one you could ignore with impunity, but it was always there. 

What is remarkable about walking through a sleeping city is to see it without the layers of social interaction that go on during the day.  People walking, bustling along the sidewalks, cars pressing to get from one place to another as quickly as possible, flaring at the stop lights.  Doors opening and closing, conversations – in person and cellular, radios.  Movement everywhere.  People coming in.  People going out.  People getting into cars with packages.  People crossing the street.  People to get out of the way of.  People to acknowledge with a small smile (not too much – this was New England after all), a courteous nod. 

A mess.

This picture of sunset was taken over a lake on my walkabout a few weeks ago on Orrs Island in Maine.  It reminded me of walking at night.  The docks abandoned.  No bungling tourists crowding there way unskillfully down to boats. 

I was looking for a place to sleep for the night.  I had hoped to go camping.  Unfortunately the only camp ground for many miles appeared not to be ready to take guests.  So much for spontaneity.  Sometimes it earns you a long night in the front seat of your car.  But I am glad to have paid that price to see the unfurling splendor of the night as it played out before me. 

It was not all that unlike night on Main Street – lit with flashing yellows and reds, the glide of white headlights, red tail lights.  Neon from pizza shops where you could see the help in the back cleaning up, running a mop through the darkened dining room up front.

Main Street emerges as something graceful and gentle under the shelter of darkness.  Something beautiful and uncomplicated.  Buildings' lines soften.  The streets flow like rivers.  There is a peace to be found at night, walking, even in the heart of a city.  It is the peace that people seek when they go out into nature.  I find that peace at night.  Temporal distance from the messiness of people.

There are days when I wish there were only nights.  Jeff loves people.  When he says they are messy, he says it with affection.  I wish I were more like him.  But I'm not.  I'm a night person.  A phantom of the sidewalks and alley ways.  Sharpened by the night.