Walking at night has always been the pursuit of the lost, the lonely, the deviant, the rebellious, the curious, the feeling, the human. The best nights are usually unplanned, random and spontaneous.
I used to walk and drive at night a lot. Even when I was still in my parents’ home. We had woods on our property. I built a fort that I used to just sit in and listen to the nocturnal creatures keeping me company or sleep on the wide porch during the rain both quieting the chaos of problems I couldn’t fix. When we moved to Denver I continued the evening constitutional. I often had trouble sleeping, a symptom of the anxiety I had experienced from moving to a new town without a support system. If I wasn’t walking, I analyzed and mapped adventures I’d someday take, plotting their routes on national geographic maps I’d been collecting that papered my walls.

Magic tumbled from her pretty lips and when she spoke the language of the universe- the stars sighed in unison. – Faudet

It’s a habit I’ve taken up again; visiting the night. It’s not always a walk, sometimes I get on the scooter or motorcycle and just ride the grid of my tiny downtown or the wide rural roads that quilt across the earth. A friend of mine and I used to do this. It always stuck with me, the way the engine lures me into a trance and melts any heaviness as I breathe the dark wind.

Wausau pretty much shuts down at 9pm. Getting home from work at 3am lends to solitude and reflection as I walk the pent up pups who want to do nothing but play Frisbee. I think they’ve taken up this ritual. Often times I find them enjoying the quiet of the dark lounging on the deck waiting for me, metronome tails thumping in time.

Shelley once wrote the night makes “a weird sound of its own stillness.” It’s a parallel universe of the same buildings and barns; but with the absence of people it lulls you with it’s with sepulchral tones. From time to time I spot silhouettes of other solitary individuals, threatened by my presence as I am by theirs. Who in their right mind is awake at 3am who doesn’t have to be? Sometimes it’s not a choice.

Unless you live in the country you tend to forget your home is built on real earth; under all that pavement there are hills, forgotten streams, forts built by some other 10 year old. Nothing’s quite the same at night. At 3am, the empty streets are no longer fighting against traffic. It’s here the solitary pedestrian or rider begins to feel the real earth. In the abstracted monochromatic condition of night, it becomes more apparent that a sloping road curves over the sleeping form of a hill and down the other side to track a creek that fed this land long ago.

The world is at its most earthly and unearthly at night, especially if it’s raining, washing yesterday away.