Walking Home in the Dark

The other night José walked his friend home, from one ranch to another. They started out around midnight, walked through the dark and the daybreak, and arrived six hours later, door to door. What did they see? Barely the road in front of them; it was a foggy and moonless night and neither thought to take a flashlight. Any wildlife? The dogs scared up a skunk. Problems? There was a moment of genuine confusion about where exactly the trail was, but this was resolved. Had I been awake, I might have heard their voices drifting up from Sacate Canyon as they passed in the hours before dawn.

I heard about the walk from José yesterday, and sadly it is not my story to tell, but it struck me as beautiful -- a simple tale, but in its own way epic. It was an adventure born of loyalty and impulsiveness, and maybe it was even a little loony, but it seemed the sort of foolishness that keeps the spirit young, and I am certain that José and his friend will forevermore have a special bond with each other and with the land that they traversed together in the dark.

I was charmed by the sense of affirmation here, too: it’s another one of those ‘yes’ things. It made me think of a pictograph I saw ten years earlier and hundreds of miles away in Monterey County. This was in a cave that the native people used for ritual and ceremony thousands of years ago, and my first thought was that the figure was holding up his hand in a forbidding gesture that meant stop.

“But look again,” said the archaeologist who was with us, “couldn’t that just as easily be a torch he is holding to better light the way?” And maybe this was just a whimsical comment, because all interpretation of ancient rock art is pretty speculative anyway, but it completely transformed my perspective. I realized how often I imagined threat instead of welcome, and how very differently I might experience the world if I altered that lens just a bit.

Certainly getting older doesn’t help. I am very aware that my sense of curiosity and adventure has been increasingly constrained over the years by caution, inhibition, fear, and practicality. I tend to contemplate the worst possible outcomes before I make a move, and some of that is just a sign of intelligence and maturity, but not when it consistently prevents action.

The best things often happen when you tune out the voice of reason and make friends with the world on its own terms. I think if we listened to the world we would hear an invitation extended with caveats -- a monition, perhaps, to be humble and light, some reminder that we are temporary -- but an invitation nonetheless.

Maybe it would sound something like these words the poet Robinson Jeffers wrote after visiting a vault of canyon rock painted with the hands of ancient people:

...You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters

In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down

And be supplanted; for you also are human.

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I am feeling very human indeed these days, and well aware that I will be supplanted, and it makes the call to live more urgent. I hope that I will surprise myself soon and step out into the dark.