Look at that, my friend’s wife (who is also my friend) said from the driver’s seat.
I looked around and didn’t see anything in the grey-blue light of dusk.
It’s light, she said. It’s 5:30 in the evening and there’s light.
I’ve been in Maine since October – more or less, trips to Seattle to see the son and Europe to see the girlfriend and Quebec to just have a fantastic time aside – and it’s the dark time of year, which I’ve not quite noticed because of the sun, the bright sky of Maine winter days, signaling cold and vitamin D in equal measure. Seattle and London winters are unrelenting grey fading to black every night, and that’s what I’d gotten used to for the past six winters. Maine is more like Edmonton, with air so cold you feel it scraping your lungs and freezing the tears on your eyelashes, but sun that warms you, letting you go without a hat even when it’s -15C without the wind chill. It didn’t strike me as dark this winter, but once mentioned, I realized she was right: it’s February, and it’s just enough through the depths of winter to start to notice the days are really getting longer. Spring isn’t too far away.
I drove to Boston in my mother’s car, as my car’s front bumper fell off a couple of weeks ago and while it’s now held on with some decent wire and clips, the headlights are out of alignment and blind oncoming cars. Mom’s car is less than a year old, and she got a good one: a sport hatch, fully loaded, zippier than I would have expected from Mom but even she seems jazzed up a bit to drive it. Taking it for a 200 mile round trip drive was a pleasure. The sun still isn’t too high in the sky, so the drive “south” to Boston – really almost dead southwest on a map, straight into the sun’s path as it dipped down across the afternoon towards the horizon on the way down – was mostly an effort to keep direct sunlight out of my eyes. The drive back, after a hit-and-miss meal with home run company, was sheer joy.
I used to drive a lot more than I do today, back when I lived in California and later in Edmonton and much earlier when I was a teenager and in college. Especially for some reason when I was going to school for the last couple years in Boston. I transferred out of Georgetown – not sure I did the right thing looking back, but oh well – and ended up not really a part of the new college (transfers never are, a lesson which I’ve learned over and over again), but having grown up in New England, it was easy to become a townie. I worked at a newspaper stand in Harvard Square and drove the van back and forth to Logan to pick up out-of-town newspaper deliveries, my social life confined to my coworkers at the newsstand and a small group of other transfers and sometimes, when they’d let me, small groups of other students who invited me along to a party because of a decent discussion in some history seminar. But when those were exhausted – which was often – I’d head over to Chestnut Hill where my sister was going to college, borrow her car, and just drive.
I’d usually grab the car on a Thursday night – I usually worked at the newsstand on the closing shift on Fridays, and the weekends were fully booked with truck routes and the occasional bit of homework – and I’d drive north, anywhere. Leaving Boston to the north, you quickly get to roads which have no streetlamps and few if any drivers, especially at 1am on a weeknight. The darkness midwinter was total, even with a moon.
Darkness isn’t a function of natural light; we’re already too separated historically from pre-electric light towns to remember what torch and candle light really means. Darkness for us now is just the lack of articial light – we recoil from the uncontrolled soft blue of a full moon as much as we do from total darkness locked in a basement. When you drive away from people, you remove artificial light – either incandescent, fuller spectrum, more yellow and warm than anything stars and moon can provide, or harsh blue-white and fluorescent and so clearly not real that it reassures you by indicating humanity’s presence. But emerging into the primal dark-light of moon and stars and reflection, I don’t remember feeling lonely or alone. I’d clock up hundreds of miles in a night – once I drove to the Canadian border, one of the middle-of-nowhere state route crossings in northern Vermont, before realizing I didn’t have my passport and I’d never make it to Montreal for smoked meat and still be back for my 9am study section for computer science – and sometimes you’d go fifteen minutes without seeing another car, or a light on a house. But you weren’t alone.
The northern New England forest just felt like home. I’d sometimes stop in the middle of nowhere and walk around for a bit, stretching my legs, having a cigarette, in those pre-cell phone days just wandering without purpose as the fan on my sister’s Honda spun in the wake of turning the engine off. It’s never silent; if there’s no wind, you hear birds and leaves rustling and the crunch of your shoes on a dirt road. If there’s wind, you heard the creak of the trees, the leaves shaking if there were leaves to shake, and the various tones of wind hum through the forest. Then feeling a bit better, I’d get back in the car and start driving again, living in a small bubble of mix tape on the radio, headlights on the highway in front of me, and sky above.
When I moved to California, the drives took me to the Central Valley, with lots more light – and dust and air pollution to make the night sky glow yellow in the star light even when the street lamps ran out – or to Nevada on the weekends, when I’d drive for days at a time. In Edmonton, I started driving again, mostly because I had to go to Calgary a lot and it’s a three hour proper drive. I started the same mental gymnastics again too – unconsciously memorizing the likely spots where troopers might set up a late night speed trap, usually one exit down from an all-night diner or gas station, where they’d lurk on the on ramp under a street lamp to be visible but still sneaky to the average semi-buzzed lead foot who represented the big catch of the night for a lonely RCMP officer on the graveyard shift.
I loved those times. I was myself – which is, really, a solitary person – and the car was an extension of me, and in its way, the landscape was too. Especially in Alberta and in New England – a dark landscape with little human touch – places where I could vanish into a forest and a highway but not vanish, I didn’t want to disappear, I just wanted to be a part of the road and part of the forest. And the road and the forest let me, in my bubble and my cassette tapes of The Pretenders and my gas station coffee and my cigarettes.
I’ve mentioned to people before that Alberta and Maine are the only places that I’ve really felt at home in my life, and to a certain extent that’s true – although I also felt at home in London, and I realize now part of that was road trips, long drives to Devon or Belgium (I know, but you can take your car on the train) or Wales. Where I feel at home isn’t where I feel “at home” – it’s where I feel like I can find that inhuman, natural light in the middle of a winter night, where I can get away from human light and just feel starlight and moonlight on my face in the cold of a long winter night.
The days are getting longer, finally, but it makes me realize how much I enjoy the long nights of a northern winter, the long nights without clouds, where you can see the sharp points of the stars and the long lazy fuzz of the Milky Way with its purples and golds and dirty whites showing how far away because the colors aren’t pure the way that Sirius and Betelgeuse and Deneb are, but you can only see those colors if you drive. I guess I haven’t driven enough this winter, not at night at least.
Then again, my car is in need of repair. It’s a little cheeky to take Mom’s car out for a 1am drive to New Brunswick or Burlington or Montreal. The bumper is scheduled to get fixed two weeks from Tuesday. My son will be here. Maybe we’ll go for a drive.