The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  Wanting to know more, I ask Saetre to return to one of my first questions. “How do I see my role as minister? I talked about making room for the sacred in the ordinary, and I said creating space for doubt, because I think doubt is essential to religious life rather than antithetical—there is no faith without doubt. The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. But the third thing I would add is that I am sought out—sometimes it’s the community at critical moments, sometimes it’s individuals in their solitude—to try to find ways to help us know our sadness, know our sorrows and our losses, and incorporate them into our ongoing journey, into our lives. How do we avoid these twins of denial, on the one hand, or triumphalism, on the other, and allow ourselves to be vulnerable in this moment of sadness and sorrow? I think that’s what ministry is in our time and maybe in most times.”

  As I listen to Saetre, I know he’s talking about more immediate sadness, such as the deaths of our student and our dean, but I’m thinking, too, of the ecologist Aldo Leopold, and a particular passage from his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac in which he mourned the destruction of the natural world. “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” wrote Leopold,

  is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

  Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac in the last years of a life cut short—he was only sixty when he died—and his book is a record of his experiences and philosophy. We think of him now as the “father of ecology” and the “father of wildlife management,” and he continues to influence conservation thinking more than sixty years after his death. In his comprehensive study Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash titled his chapter on Leopold simply “Prophet.” Leopold saw what others did not see or did not want to see. And with that vision came a fair amount of sadness. For how can you love something and not mourn its destruction?

  Interestingly, when Leopold first drafted A Sand County Almanac, he placed the above passage in his introduction, but then he moved it, fearing its somber message might turn people off. But at least for me—and I’m sure for Leopold—the answer has never been to “make believe” that the realities of human destruction don’t exist. Our oceans are on the brink of collapse, our land is full of poisons, our world is warming at a terrible rate—how do we live a joyful life while still engaged with this knowledge?

  Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear, bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky—every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere, so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.

  Still, if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I’m not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men, though these are certainly worthy. I’m just thinking about what’s happening to the natural world. But “you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen,” said Rilke. “You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”

  I tell Saetre of Leopold, of Rilke, of how, already in Australia, they’re speaking of solastalgia, about missing a loved place that still exists but to which the old birds and plants and animals no longer come. A word newly coined for our time, solastalgia combines the Latin word for comfort (solacium) and the Greek root meaning pain (algia) and differs from nostalgia in that it’s a yearning for a place you still inhabit rather than one you’ve left behind. It’s a word we’ll be hearing more often, for wherever we live, the climate has changed, or soon will. Next to my own death or that of my family this is the darkness I fear most, this sadness at the ongoing destruction of the wild world.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “You can survive being that vulnerable. You really can. I think it is at the heart of being human, sorrow and sadness. It’s certainly an essential component of loving. If you don’t want to cry, then don’t love anything.”

  One night David Saetre was ten years old and walking home at night in the dark, and he walked into the Lutheran church where his family worshiped. The church was unlocked, dark; there was no one there. He walked right up to the altar. “I was still pretty young,” he says, “because all I knew was that the altars in church were ‘the holy.’ You didn’t go there. As far as I knew I might be struck down dead, I might be violating something sacred. I remember feeling the paradox of exhilaration and fear. Much, much later, the first time I read Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, in which he describes religious experience as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—that is, the encounter with the mystery that causes you to tremble with fear and yet is so fascinating or compelling that you cannot help being called to it—I said, ‘I know what that is.’ To stand in the presence and tremble and remain fascinated without being consumed, that is just the classic religious experience of holy fear.”

  “Does that relate to our fear of the dark?” I ask.

  “It is precisely pertinent to how we regard darkness,” he explains, “because it has represented, especially in the West, the ultimate encounter with the dark and our need to again find an unambiguous light so that we don’t have to face the kind of holy fear of death. What I would call a necessary fear.”

  “Could you say ‘good’ fear?”

  “Yes, good fear, valuable fear. It makes me think of the No Fear brand of clothing that was so popular awhile back. I asked a student one day, ‘What does that mean to you? Why are you wearing that logo?’ And some of the students then started talking about taking risks, and to be really alive you have to have no fear. And I said, ‘Bullshit. If you are really, really alive, you are scared shitless and you do it anyway. You get on that surfboard, you climb that wall. If you have no fear, you have no experience. So absolutely take the risks: Go backpacking, go whitewater kayaking, and know the fear. In fact, put that on your shirt: Know Fear.’ ”

  “It’s the same thing with sadness,” I say.

  “Instead of no sadness it is ‘know sadness.’ If you don’t become intimate with sadness, you cannot be intimate with yourself or others or the world.”

  “Know darkness?”

  “Absolutely.”

  In this northern Wisconsin town, sometimes driving for morning coffee I would pass a red fox reduced to slop at the road’s edge, or a broken fawn, its stick legs and crumpled white-spotted coat reminding me of bagpipes dropped in a corner. One spring a lumber truck demolished a bear, leaving dark blood and black fur smeared across several yellow highway dashes.

  Death here is not always so dramatic—creatures as tiny as mosquitoes and dragonflies, as small as toads and rabbits and turtles, turn up regularly. Fish float to shore, their mouths fixed in last gasp. A wolverine’s forearm, lying by a two-track through the woods, claw still attached.

  But when it comes to human death, my culture hides it as much as possible, treating it similarly to melancholy or sadness, or darkness—a subject to be avoided, rather than a part of human life as natural as the moon and the tides.

  I have never been with another human as he or she died. My grandparents all died far from me, with my seeing them alive for the last time and seeing them again at their funeral separated by a moat of unspoken space. I do not complain; I am grateful that death has been an infrequent visitor. I know it’s a matter of time. But when I receive an email from a dear colleague across the country telling me she has been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, that she will begin chemotherapy this fall, I bow my head and think, What do I k
now about death?

  “Well, don’t be too hard on yourself,” Saetre says. “The task isn’t to overcome the anxiety. It is to learn to know it and, knowing it, be willing to live in it. I think one can come to know the anxiety of the unknown of death to such a point that one overcomes the anxiety as ‘bad fear’ and can embrace it with a kind of ‘good fear.’ I have witnessed it many, many times. I saw it with Rick Fairbanks.”

  As the dean at the small college where I met David Saetre, Rick Fairbanks gave me my first teaching job. I was in his office many times, enough to notice the dramatic weight loss one spring, the kind of loss that makes you wonder if something is terribly wrong. Oh, someone told me, he’s really been into cross-country skiing. Oh, I remember thinking, that’s fantastic. But it wasn’t, and some six months after being diagnosed, he was dead.

  “He was a trained philosopher and he could be a son of a bitch,” Saetre says, “but as he was dying his reflections were really profound. At some point he stopped reading philosophy and, while he was still able to read, he started reading novels that he loved. He said, ‘I just want to read stories about the endless possibility and variety of being human.’ When he couldn’t read anymore and became bed-bound, he would want you to tell him stories.”

  The story that moved around town in the days after his death is this: On the day Rick Fairbanks died, he asked his daughter to tell him a story about paddling. And so she created a narrative of a paddle that they had done together on Lake Superior, where the sea had started calm and easy and then got rough. And she said to him, “It’s kind of like right now. The seas are rough.” He was saying almost no words at that time, but he said, “I kind of like it that way.”

  Saetre says, “I know that he was fully conscious of the double meaning of his comment. Here was someone who gave a lot of thought to dying. He dove into it. He was coming to know death and wasn’t in denial of the kind of fear that is attendant to dying but because he knew death, he could live in it. It wasn’t that there is NO fear, but in KNOWing the possibility of death that was soon to come and of knowing his fear, he could live in it in such a way that it no longer controlled him. I think when we talk about fear of the dark, or our fear of dying, it really is fear not only of the unknown but fear of losing control.”

  Still, Saetre says, if we avoid all circumstances of the dark, then we live in that false world of controlling and manipulating nature so that we don’t have to experience fear. “But you will be afraid in the dark,” he explains. “Don’t run from it. Know the fear and know the dark, and—getting back to Rick—I think that is what he was experiencing the night he died: ‘I am no longer afraid of dying,’ in other words, ‘I am no longer resisting death. Do I know what this is going to be? No, this is going to be a hell of a ride, probably—but I can live in that, and I can die in that.’ ”

  Then, looking at me, Saetre smiles, “If I had been quicker-witted when you said you don’t think you know much about death, I would have said, well, tell me what you know about darkness, because they are deeply linked.”

  3

  Come Together

  A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.

  —ALDO LEOPOLD (1949)

  The Isle of Sark rises abruptly from the English Channel, three-hundred-foot cliffs topped by dark hedgerow lines and sloping checkerboard greens, looking as if chipped from England and floated out to sea. But that is Sark in daylight; at night, in the dark, Sark nearly disappears. With no streetlights, no cars or trucks, no petrol stations lit to daylight, just the pubs, farms, and homes of its six hundred residents, Sark emits almost no light of its own. Seventy miles south of England and just half that north of France, Sark itself covers only two square miles, but it soon may have an impact beyond its size as the world’s first International Dark Sky Island.

  Until about a year ago, I had never heard of Sark. My guess is most of the world’s nearly seven billion people could say the same. But at least a few more know about this tiny island now, thanks to its recognition in 2010 by the International Dark-Sky Association. The IDA began its International Dark Sky Places program in 2001 with its designation of Flagstaff, Arizona, as the world’s first International Dark Sky City. That category—Dark Sky City—has since been changed to Dark Sky Community, and has been joined by such designations as Dark Sky Parks and Dark Sky Reserves. And not that the IDA has cornered the market on such designations, as similar programs exist elsewhere. In Canada, the Royal Astronomy Society has its own system of Dark Sky Preserves, for example, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has initiated its own Starlight Reserves program, too. Although each varies slightly in its approach, the different programs are working toward the same general goal: protecting darkness in a world of ever increasing artificial light.

  What makes Sark especially compelling is that people actually live there, with their fears of the dark, their concerns for safety, their desire for “progress.” As important as it is to protect areas of wild pristine sky, it’s the protection of darkness in places where people actually live that will ultimately change attitudes toward light and darkness.

  “If you only want to slap patches on very dark places, you can do that to your heart’s content, cover the world with dark sky parks,” says Steve Owens, the Scotsman who helped walk Sark through a two-year process with the IDA. “But it wouldn’t affect one single light. Whereas Sark, they had to do some light work.” By “light work,” Owens means that in order to qualify for the IDA recognition, the community of Sark had to take action—inventory its existing lights, change those lights that were causing excessive glare and sky glow, and promise that any new lights would conform to anti–light pollution regulations. In doing so, they met the IDA’s definition of an International Dark Sky Community: “a town, city, municipality, or other legally organized community that has shown exceptional dedication to the preservation of the night sky through the implementation and enforcement of quality lighting codes, dark sky education, and citizen support of dark skies.”

  “They actually want the places that are on the borderline,” Owens explains of the IDA, “the places that should be good but aren’t, and can get good by doing some work on the lighting. They’re not so much interested in places that are already exemplary, because it doesn’t achieve their goal of improving lighting.” A Dark Sky Community, then, acts as an example to help people understand that darkness—and good lighting—isn’t something just for National Parks or communities near observatories, but something to which everyday communities could aspire.

  Born and raised in Inverness, Scotland, at the edge of the famed Loch Ness, Steve Owens grew up interested in astronomy, ran a science show theater “where people blow stuff up and set fire to things,” and now makes part of his living helping communities develop their dark sky identities. His first success came when the IDA declared Galloway Forest Park in southwestern Scotland the first Dark Sky Park in Europe. Galloway, which claims Bortle 2 skies, is the first in what Owens hopes will be a long list of parks in the United Kingdom to become dark sky reserves. “I don’t think that’s excessive,” he says. “Mainly because the national parks in the UK are called ‘Britain’s breathing spaces,’ and the measurement they take of their success in that is a measurement of tranquillity. They’ve done study upon study of what people think tranquillity means, and always in the top three is a good, clear night sky and no light pollution.”

  As important as official designations may be, Owens believes that ultimately dark sky areas will only succeed if they are supported by local communities. When astronomy programs began to take off in Galloway Park, for example, and people who lived in or near the
park started to hear others saying Galloway was one of the best places in Europe for stargazing, their reaction was, Owens says with a smile, “ ‘Oh, I didn’t know that. Do I live in one of the best places in Europe for stargazing? That’s quite good.’ And that filtered through eventually, and people got excited.

  “It’s all about education,” says Owens. “It’s about making sure that people are aware of dark skies. Most people, up until relatively recently, weren’t. I think the real sea-change, the massive step forward, has come through the Dark Sky Parks. The Galloway Forest Park might affect hundreds of thousands of people over the next few years as they visit the park. And more than that, one hundred sixty million people worldwide heard about this effort. Certainly in the UK media, that elevated light pollution to a different level.”

  The popularity of the dark sky places idea stems from their focus on the positive, Owens believes. “The media definitely were interested in reporting a good news story that was about environmentalism and economics and tourism and astronomy. Also, in the UK, there’s just a massive momentum behind the dark sky movement, the astronomy movement. And it’s not coming from preaching about people’s bad lighting, it’s coming out of, ‘See how amazing this stuff looks when you can get good sky.’ ”

  But tonight, the night I have come all the way to Sark—from Paris on a train to the French coastal city of St. Malo, a ferry to Guernsey, a tug to Sark, a tractor to the village center, a horse-drawn Victorian carriage down a one-lane dirt road to a bicycle to visit with island resident Annie Dachinger until midnight—the sky is filled with clouds, and I haven’t seen a single star.

  “You might still,” she laughs. “You should have consulted a good witch before you came.” Sark has a bad habit, she explains, of toying with its visitors. “It can be rainy and drizzly all day, and just as people are getting on their boat to go back, the sun will come out. And I’ll think, Oh, you bitch! How cruel!”