When I was young, you’d never have caught me in the woods alone—even in the daytime. But now I hike in the dark on Candlers Mountain every week.
Tonight, as I luxuriated in a full moon and solitude, I tried to remember my first-ever treks in the dark. Between you and me, they were the times I was too scared to stay home—when the dark of the night seemed like a better option than the dark of my bedroom. I rode my bike in the dark to a workmate’s house one night after my dad roughed me up. Another night (years before I’d have a cell phone), I walked with no provisions for hours until I got to my buddy’s house. He’d already gone to bed. So, I laid down in the mulch next to his front porch.
Over time, the walks in the dark moved to utility and then normalcy. I used to walk home from open-to-close shifts in a shoe store on muggy nights during my college summers. The summer I was a camp counselor, I played a version of Capture the Flag for which I ran in the dark. I led my girlfriend through a moonless hay field the night I proposed to her. After we got married, I walked into harvested corn fields to pray when I didn’t know what else to do. After I became a dad, I paced Iceland’s black sand beaches hours after sunset while I talked to the only Father I had left to trust.
Somewhere in there, my heart learned to be safe with only the moon as a companion. I still sometimes see bears where they aren’t. My heart still skips a beat when a deer or squirrel shoots through leaves I can only hear. But once my eyes adjust to a lunar dome light, I feel at home on the quiet side of a mountain on the back side of Earth’s daily rotation.
