I have a chronic habit of nighttime hikes, something that seems foolish when said point-blank. Perhaps foolish with a hint of thrill-seeking, which I’d reflexively deny but cannot honestly ignore. One particularly foolish moment was nervously and hurriedly finding my way home whilst showing a good friend the nearby quarries via camera. That was before I had really cut my teeth with night. I’ve hiked alone from a fairly young age, but being truly comfortable exploring after dark was a tolerance built up later. In combination with seeing the landscape in a literal different light, the thrill of altered senses and slight tension is something I probably am seeking, deep down. I guess it really isn’t all that unusual laid out like this. Today however, I’d like to talk about when the thrill became something a bit more than I sought. When altered senses did sense a little too much. Something that may sound ridiculous to be afraid of but stands out as one of the most disturbing moments I’ve wandered into.
The late afternoon was cool, in air and in cast. The pale light finding its way down met gray skeletal trees and the sparse remnants of last week’s snow. Being January when I started there was a mere one or two hours left before dark. This was not a concern; I’d ended strolls in twilight many times. This particular ramble began out in the country near the Wiccopee Reservoir, at the end of a serpentine dirt road beside a long-forgotten plow truck. The trail runs beside the nearby highway for several hundred meters and takes the first southerly valley to head into the vast state woodland. I passed an odd collection of hilltop-like microbiomes, complete with long grass and blueberry bushes thus far only found at higher elevations. The trail inch-wormed over these hills, then took a left and headed down the steep valley, appearing to have once been a mining road from its width. On the left was a slope comprised of vast boulders, far larger than any from the quarries, a testament that the old gods of geology still reign supreme. Their points and hollows interlocking gray plate-mail, rusted with moss. Two steep hills guarded the descent, the left wearing its stony armor. Once at the bottom I looked back, and mentally noted the Land of Giant Rocks II.
Beyond was the long stretch of swamp, unbearably thick with mosquitoes in the summer. There are peculiar places I come across while hiking that imprint as representatives of the time I saw them. A vernal pool once dark and leafy in spring now frozen over, a cliff that wore the icy fringe of January now sunlit in July. When meeting them in an opposite season, one gets the same distinct feeling as the first time they see their schoolteacher on a trip to the supermarket. Even knowing the particulars of why this occurs, I cannot help always falling for it, as I did upon seeing the Congo drained of color. Now the mosquitoes and skunk cabbage seemed to never have been, and the swamp was nearly unrecognizable in the dim evening. At the end of the swamp trail after two streams were the tiny rapids, where one could see the upper basin of the reservoir through frost-ravaged cattails. This place was open air, so produced only pure sound of brisk water. I’d stay to enjoy the babbling brook, but the gathering dark made me want to keep moving.
One of the benefits of being out after dark was that the return journey had a distinct flavor to it, long straights bloom out of nothing and unseen trickling sounds in darkness reminds one of a cave. You’re re-reading what you previously took in, searching now for hidden detail. People talk about the dark and use it often in conjunction with being quiet and peaceful, or absent. There is a difference between dark and absence. Absence merely takes away, but the dark gives as much as is taken. In some ways the dark can make things louder. What is close to you announces itself with the bullhorn of contrast. Walking through the swamp, I noticed more unusual shapes to trees, strange snarls and twirled trunks, invisible in the comfortable normalcy of day. Texture too becomes greater in the dark, with all the little scars of time on stones resembling Apollo 11’s view from orbit. I often wonder if this is not merely the nature of the dark and contrast at play but something psychological, some atavistic need for detail when threats abound. In a way, the act of remembering that summertime swamp functioned very much like day. It captured the swamp as a scene, for lack of better terms a ‘vibe’, and as winter/dark fell, the details crashed against the vibe. I walked along, engrossed in the details before me, forgetting that another vibe was fast approaching.
I hadn’t noticed the end of the swamp trail and the start of the valley trail until the path quickly became steeper. I broadened my attention and suddenly realized there was no ground beyond the trail to the right. I should’ve been expecting this, having noted the way I came an hour before. Before I had time to imagine, I raised my light upwards and the bottom dropped out of my gut. Something was different, something was terribly wrong here. Where before had been the sheltering slope was a dark, faceless terror poised to rush forth at me. It loomed over, the gap between us somehow making everything worse. What in day were the cool hollows between mossy stones had under my light become countless eerie black voids, each glance feeling like falling in. This was synesthesia for hearing one’s name spoken coldly from behind. I suppose that on my list of fear responses, flight is the most common. I don’t remember very many instances of being truly paralyzed with fear. In that valley I was reduced to a helpless creature frozen before this terror. After what shouldn’t have been ten seconds, ego finally caught up with id and began rendering what was ahead. I slowly regained agency, recognizing this as the hill I had seen before. I hadn’t turned up my light or walked closer, but as though the hill had announced in a softer tone, I had now started to perceive it differently. The terror had gone.
For quite some time after this occurred, I struggled to describe why this encounter felt so oddly mismatched. I chocked it up to monumentality, the primal fear of falling, and just another amusing trick of the mind like seeing the swamp in winter. While those are equally plausible, they don’t explain what this was doing attached to the mere sight of a steep hill and boulders at nighttime. There was an almost guilty feeling to it, I have no other word for it, like a sudden icy glare from someone close. Perhaps the fleeting idea of being lost is to blame, but like the others it misses the exact sense. Looking at the whole journey in memory was when I started considering what my own mileposts mean. That hill, through the process of being remembered, had essentially become a companion, marked by assurance. Maybe by virtue of its size, it had also taken on the archetype of a guardian or guide. Perhaps this tendency is natural to humanity, treating every landform with frigid, gray objectivity would quickly have driven any early hominin mad. I had expected to see it on the way back, but the momentary presentation of that companion, cold and glaring in silhouette with all of its comforting character denied had unearthed a unique and deep kind of dread. To use a modern analogy, the hill had opened the interaction with “we need to talk”. It happened fast enough that I didn’t have time to surmise what was about to show itself, and once more was learned, the spell was broken. There’s one particular horror trope that this brings to mind. Many of our scariest monsters bear the most familiar forms, often our own. I suppose the hills have really grown quite familiar to me. Looking back after describing this in detail, it is quite humorous how worked up I managed to get over an ordinary fact of life, just with less light. I would disagree only with the assertion that it was a mundane fact of life. In a dark moment, a hill could become icon of comfort lost, the hellish mirror-image of presence, anything but ordinary.
