The lights and the television click on at nightfall.
Bathed in the electric glow, cozy in artificial
Light, they banish night and darkness from our
Lives.
Yard, porch, and street lights push the darkness
Beyond the limits of vision eclipsing the sky itself.
And he who ventures beyond electricity carries
Flashlight, lantern or candle.
I slip into my snowshoes on a full moon February night
Into two feet of snow on the River Trail that begins
Outside my door in the Indiana Dunes national park.
I have always been a creature of shadow and dark.
Lift and glide -- lift and glides the rhythm of
Snowshoeing as the hinged bindings slip one
Shoe over the other so that my tracks always
Overlap.
The darkness of the forest was a halo around my head.
But I could see -- not in color as in the day --
Nevertheless, in shades of black and white and grey.
And I saw with the edges of my eyes.
When I looked at the world sideways more was
Revealed than would have been by looking
Head on.
This shifty-eyed slipping through night is because there
Are primeval low-light receptors found only around the
Peripheries of our vision, but most have forgotten how to see
In the night.
As the woods grew darker, my night vision grew sharper.
Dark and light, day and night, shade and shadow -- words hint
At but cannot reveal the gradations of light. It is never dark even
On a moonless night.
Slipping each snowshoe halfway through the risers of the
Footbridge, I climbed up and crossed over the Little Calumet River,
water whose source is Lake Michigan, pulsing under a skin of ice,
Still wild, wandering where it will.
I followed a shortcut around a bluff until I reached the transmission
Towers and knew I was no longer on the River Trail. I cut cross country
Through a stand of saplings and deep snow wanting to find the trail again,
And I fell and struggled to rise.
I panicked and the darkness sucked all energy and warmth from my body.
I stopped and breathed and breathed, calming and regaining my night vision.
My tracks in the snow, I realized, I would follow back to the bridge over the
Little Calumet.
Teeth chattered and I shivered violently -- the onset of hypothermia. I must move.
So tired I had to will each step, as I moved, I warmed and twenty minutes of labor
Brought me to the footbridge. I struggled up, back over and down. Call it
Adrenaline or call it will.
Picking up the pace, I began to glide on the snowshoes -- like cross-country skiing. The moon reappeared from behind the clouds where it had hidden during my ordeal. I was warm and strong again as I broke running and whooping into an open field.
And the snow became the page upon which the tracks of my snowshoes Left a poem which sang the beauty of darkness and night. A poem of Snowshoeing through a stark snowed winter wood on a full moon's night.
Copyright 1997, Bud Polk
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