Guest column: Matt Gaw
I’ve found a freedom and a vividness walking at night that I have never experienced in the pale blur of daytime…
An eloquent defence of darkness.
ISTILL REMEMBER THAT first walk in the forest near my Suffolk home. The snow clouds meant there was no visible sunset. The sky did not burn and bruise; the hot yolk of the sun did not split and run across the horizon in golds, yellows and peach. The cold, white sky did not even blush.
Instead, the light thickened and clotted as darkness began to form: seeping and smoking from between pines planted an arm’s-length apart. It puffed from the shadows of my footsteps on the track, and welled up from the deep, frozen ruts made by 4x4s and the machinery that trundles through the plantation.
I’m not sure why I kept walking that night. Part of it was just the rhythm of it all: the swing of the legs, the addictive, crump, crump, crump of the snow. But also, I had been inspired by my 10-year-old son, whose campaign for a later bedtime included an appeal to the fact that an average human spends 26 years asleep.
His words wormed their way into my brain. They made me realise that my experience of night was one of eyes moving sightlessly against lowered lids rather than a view of the changing shades of the nocturnal hours. Although he might not have meant it as such, it was also a rebuke; a reminder that for all of my life’s apparent fullness, it was in fact being only half lived. After all, I couldn’t remember the last time I was out at night. Not just out, camping, running or toddling home from pubs, but really out; walking and watching as the light fades, experiencing darkness creeping up with each passing minute, from mountain to meadow. And so, I went into the wood. Into the darkness.
I walked for hours that night. I listened as the woods relaxed into the dark and shuffled through a topsy-turvy world where the only light came from the snow. At the forest’s edge I watched a herd of fallow deer pour from the dark and over the path in front of me, the experience heightened by the shades of the night; as if the deer weren’t just images on the eye, a reflection of movement on the retina, but something the whole body experienced.
I realised that night, and reflecting on it foot-sore and tired the next morning, that the nocturnal hours were not what I expected. I guess, at least subconsciously, night has always seemed a dark and gloomy place. A solid, black bookend to the day, that inspires fear and anxiety. But there among the trees, cloud and snowglow, I could see that night was not just one long stretch of unforgiving darkness, any more than daytime is constant bright blue sky. No, night is full of its own subtle shades of light, capable of illuminating the landscape and inspiring in us a sense of connection and wonder.
I decided to explore more, to immerse myself in all the different types of light and dark that night has to offer: I wanted to feel moonlight on my skin, to see a hard frost of stars across a dark sky and for once in my life, to give myself over to the night. But I also knew, however tempting it was, that I shouldn’t just run to those wild places where the dark is deep and the natural light of the moon and stars are brightest. I also wanted to understand how nights in the UK are changing, how the ever-increasing blaze of artificial light has chewed into the nocturnal hours, warping the natural rhythms of humans and other species and taking with it a perspective of our own place in the world.
So, for the next year, I walked and walked at night. I returned to the woods, I chased the full moon to the coast and swam in its light. I strolled through London as it tossed and turned to sleep, and patrolled empty suburban streets in Bury St Edmunds – even sharing a cup of tea with an owl on a town centre roundabout. I trekked across the tors and bogs of Dartmoor, through the forests of Galloway and the machair of the Isle of Coll (an island with no streetlights at all).
On those walks I found a world of beauty, of subtlety and shades that I had previously not noticed. I saw that in the dark there is light that connects us to all living things and all ages; a light that our own bright lives is in danger of snuffing out.