A Long Night's Journey into Day

Nocturnal habits. Four in the morning, and I was thinking about nocturnal habits, which happens to be one of my nocturnal habits. I had a cup of tea and the Sunday Times of London cryptic puzzle, and it was the best of times. No telephone, no traffic noise, no demands on my attention, just velvety night quiet and contentment. Then the dawn bird started up.

There’s always that one bird, always has been, as far back as I can remember, just as the night sky starts to go from black to luminous deep blue. He’s high up in a tree somewhere and gets the hint of coming light before I do. That damn bird always starts up just then, an hour before true dawn, in every place I’ve ever been. The dawn song is distinctive; I know the notes, but I don’t know the singer’s name, his species. But the song is the same, wherever I am, uptown, downtown, crosstown, out of town, out of the country. Maybe it’s the same bird, following the thread of my life like some guardian angel or ancient mariner’s albatross. He was there outside the college dorm in Virginia years ago at finals time. I heard him when I was nine or ten months pregnant, too oddly shaped to find a comfortable position for sleeping and anyway always poised for the next phase. As I leaned on a piling and watched the glassy-still water of Newport harbor turn opalescent, I heard him explain the light shift. As I slapped mosquitoes and raced the spreading light at Third Beach, putting disaster makeup on an actor in a night-time movie scene, he nagged me to go faster. When I strayed back to my tent from a bluegrass festival jam in the woods, he mocked my immoderation.

This is real time this bird deals in, sun time, not calendar time. Standard time, daylight savings time, Greenwich Mean Time in the meantime mean nothing to him. The sun will come regardless. I sigh. I don’t want to know. It means my favorite time has fled again, and all those mundane daylight things are on their way.

The night hours, the dark hours, have their own rhythms. Hospitals have noted that those most delicately balanced at the edge of life are more likely to slip away around 3:00 a.m. than at any other time; the scientific conclusion is that the absence of natural light and the shifts and changes that accompany the sun’s transit create a sort of biological stillness, a slowing of metabolism that can tip a frail balance.

It has also been observed that the onset of the long winter nights of lands far from the equator can trigger deep depression in some people; remember Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane? This depression is treated either by relocating the patient closer to the equator, or more practically, by extending the perceived day by the use of daylight-emulating artificial lighting.

On the other hand, there are those who love the dark hours. I am one, as I’ve explained. There’s an extraordinary sense of freedom in that time for me, a sort of anarchistic glee at the destruction of schedule and routine. The grownups have gone to bed; it’s time to play. Concepts, designs flow effortlessly; problems are solved; ideas are born. What could be work is pure fun.

But there’s serious business going on out there in the dark – not just human business like depression and dying, but the all-in-a-night’s-work, bringing-home-the-bacon sort of business that belongs to the natural night creatures. There are gatherers and crops and hunters and prey. Have you ever been driven mad by a hyperactive hamster in the small hours? The silly little thing is only doing what he would do in the wild, which is gathering food in the dark, when it’s much safer for small furry creatures with wretchedly bad eyesight and very little brain.

But for every gatherer in nature, there seems to be a predator, and the owl is one of the best. Like eagles, hawks, and buzzards, he’s a raptor, with talons meant for seizing prey and a sharp hooked beak for tearing flesh; but unlike his cousins, he’s specially designed for night work. Those great round eyes allow him to hunt by starlight, and heaven help the field mouse who rustles in the grass, because the owl’s keen hearing will surely pick it up.

Imagine him soaring on those great pinions, surveying the landscape as if it were a pastoral smorgasbord, nothing to betray his silent patrol but perhaps a little moonshadow. He likes almost anything in the key of rodent, and since in the rodent world silliness seems to increase as size decreases, field mice are a staple of his diet. I once heard an owl get really lucky, though, just as I was dozing off in a cabin in the Virginia woods. A scream ripped through the inky quiet of the night, a sound so nearly human I know it couldn’t be a wildcat. Maybe it WAS human? In that moment, I learned the exact sensation of having one’s hair stand on end. The sound wasn’t repeated, and I wasn’t about to venture into the copperhead-infested fields to investigate. But late the next afternoon, as I was walking along the far edge of the cornfield, I found the mostly-devoured remains of a recently deceased cottontail. It was the first I knew that rabbits have voices.

There are other mysteries, just as haunting but far more beautiful, that the darkness reveals, like the tiny, phosphorescent creatures that glimmer and sparkle in the friction between ocean and rock, a tiny sea-borne galaxy outlining the night-time shore, or trailing like a comet’s tail in the hissing wake of a sailboat. And for really glorious phosphorescence, nothing beats a school of squid rocketing along just under the surface on a moonless night. One can’t see these things except in the absence of daylight, so when the herald of light, that damnable dawn bird, announces the coming of day, I mourn the end of enchantment. It’s just as well I don’t know his name, his species, for his song always reminds me that in more barbarous times, it was considered good form to kill the bearer of bad tidings. I’d cheerfully add dawn birds to the list of endangered species.