Dancing in the Dark — a walk in the woods at night
I decide to take my beanie off as it isn’t helping, muffling my hearing, dimming my vision even further, increasing the scratching sense of dread that encroaches at the periphery of my awareness. Panting, breath pluming in the frosted night air, I force myself to stop. To look, to listen, to be aware, to rationalise where I am and what I’m doing. To try to see beyond my current state of being; alone, in the dark, in a snow-carpeted Finnish forest. It’s just then that I hear the branch snap.
We’ve been reading a lot about primal knowledge, ancestral wisdom, rewilding. My wife and I discuss a paragraph she had read referring to night walking. An instant gateway to our ancestry, to a time before artificial light and the artifice of security it brings to the modern mind.
The principle is simple. Go for a walk. At night. Somewhere dark. Don’t bring a torch. The purpose is to reconnect with ourselves and our landscapes in new ways, to trust our eyes to see even when we think there is no light. To find our way, when we think it may be impossible. To encounter our deep-seated fear of the dark head on, senses tingling, mind thrumming. To encounter the face of Nature.
The beginning of my walk though, is a more quotidian affair. A thirty minute blast to recirculate the blood after a long day in front of the computer. Something I am still getting reused to after years of just being a smallholder, not a smallholder and permaculture communications worker as I am at the moment.
My boys and my wife in tow, we head down the dirt lane from our house, passing neighbours’ fields, barley stubble still showing through the fresh snow. The children seem determined to act the fool, pushing and tripping and slipping in the icy tyre ruts. Lagging, lolloping, screaming, irritating their already irritated father. And they keep mentioning torches.
Why can’t we turn on a torch? It’s dark, I can’t see. When can we go home?
A walk with children feels like a metaphor for life after fatherhood in general. All the pace is removed from the experience. No matter how hard you push to make ground, to strive forward, you are weighted now, yoked to your responsibility, and to your children’s rhythm. And, tonight that just won’t do. I need to move my body, to feel the warmth and release of muscles working. I need quiet and calm, not manic tomfoolery.
My indignation reaches a simmer, then a rolling boil and I snap at the elder, who in my mind at that moment is the principle agitator and therefore the focus of my ire. I issue stern warnings which are roundly ignored and my wife, sensing our proximity to the scalding caldera of my day’s frustrations, very kindly offers to take them back home; to let me be.
Their tinkling giddiness drifts away with the clomp, clomp, clomp of six boots on an icy path and I am alone. And of course, instead of relief, what I feel is guilt, for being such a grumpy arse.
I am a thoroughly unexceptional father. Doling out admonishment and affection in almost equal measure. Occasionally capable of silliness and childish joy, but not suited to it. I enjoy my children most when they rise to my level rather than me sinking to theirs and my most intimate moments are quiet conversation or reading with them, tucked up on the sofa or in bed. But thinking through these ‘civilised’ characteristics of my parenting, highlights the most farcical contradictory truth of the whole shebang.
We, as a civilisation, try to treat parenting much the same way as we treat our relationship with our planet. We seek to impose control, dominion, to rationalise and medicalise and psychologise the process in order to feel in charge, to feel like we are doing it in an orderly manner, that we are above it all. And yet, conceiving, gestating, birthing and then raising a child is probably the most feral, uncontrolled, truly wild activity civilised people engage in. Creating a conduit for all that life force made material, is as primal as it gets. Our offspring rage into this world dragging us into their universe of needs, desires and bodily excreta. They cling to our chests with tiny new fingers, howling; “I am alive!” just as their brother and sister wolves do deep in the forests. They are who they are immediately, and no amount of design or determined manipulation on our parts will change that. They are a great lesson to our urbane, mundane, insane way of being. They are Mother Nature incarnate and we had best heed her message and be grateful for the reminder of her true face.
I fork right instead of left at the junction, away from home, toward the forest. A hazy corona of low moonlight is visible briefly at the end of the road. My speed increases as the way wends past dormant wild raspberry and stands of scrawny birch and rowan. The darkness intensifying as spruce and pine begin to dominate again. The snow has that scrunch of a cold night getting colder.
The chapter on night walking states that our eyes adjust initially to darkness over a period of fifteen minutes, but that it takes a full forty-five minutes for them to fully dilate. Only one second of artificial light will undo all of that slow awakening. I can see just fine, just as the kids could see just fine when they were complaining that they couldn’t. Even now, I cling on to the bitter sniping mindset I carried earlier.
We live in a pretty dark part of Europe. Our nearest neighbours are five hundred metres away and there are only six permanently inhabited homes within 3 kilometres of us. There are no street lights and the nearest town is 25 minutes drive away. But there is plenty of light. Of course a night like tonight, snow clad, reflective, accentuates the ambient star and moonlight anyway, but even with just mud and moss and leaf litter beneath your feet you can see.
And of course I’m following a man-made path, so it’s safe, and knowable, even in the glowering gloom. This road leads to Esko the horse breeder’s house. The gentle-eyed man that brought us a tractor load of manure to start our garden with. The road continues past his house and eventually to the lake. To memories of summer saunas, swims and dreams of zander, perch and pike.
But in this moment, on this unlit December evening, I realise it’s not my path, and I look to my left, to the towering fir trees, obscure occluded barcodes against the white banking of the hillside. Do I dare walk home through the forest? My feet and arms decide for me, as I sweep strangled, entangled saplings to one side and disappear briefly from the human world and enter into the real world. Into the woods.
The first thing I notice is how much quieter it is. The foliage dampening, enfolding, cosseting. And how very much darker. I feel the need to coach myself already.
I know these woods now. I’ve walked through this area scooping berries, uprooting ceps and forest lamb mushrooms. It’s my patch. It’s safe. At least during the daylight.
But I’m instantly lost. Unsure of myself, unsure of the way. Tripping on fallen limbs, sinking through crusts of snow into mossy hollows that may or may not be the homes of woodland creatures. I pick up a game trail, or what I think is one and follow it around a granite bluff that obscures even more of the dwindling moonlight. The wet scratch of Christmas tree boughs across my cheeks. My boot slips again as moss sloughs away from unforgiving stone. I’m starting to panic ever so slightly but follow my gut in the direction I hope home is.
I think of my boys again, hurling snow, shouting, cursing and wrestling, irritating me. In this moment, and for some reason I don’t understand, I reconsider their carelessness. Not as the crude dent in my idealistic notion of civility and familial harmony, but simply as an expression of their true faces, of their Nature. Just as this forest is tangled and snarling one footstep and soft and comforting the next; just as what I perceive in the shadows as sinister chaos is in fact the same deliriously pleasurable place I have fallen in love with in the light: so then are my children, and so then is my fatherhood and therefore, so then, am I. Their essence and this forest’s essence and my essence is unshakeable, ancestral and profound. It is and will remain, a solid reassuring constant despite my flickering, changeling mind and its fledgling ability to perceive reality clearly. I have brought my baggage to their party. To this forest. Not the other way around.
So keen as I was to be left alone half an hour before, I now miss them all again with a quiet urgency. But they’re not here. Just me. Such is my fickle nature.
Over a subtle rise, the woods begin to take on a familiarity, the canopy opens somewhat and soft moonlight washes over a carpet of lichens I recognise. A triumphal flurry fills my chest. My gut was right, I am heading in the the right direction, I know what I’m doing. And then I immediately stumble over a rotting log and lay a curse on my short-lived hubris.
I am getting what I came for though. My body is warm, my blood, mind and senses are thrumming with the experience. I break out of a stand of pine and cross the small track that transects our nearest hillside before it descends to the neighbour’s red wooden house and barns. Delving back into the woods on the other side, I really am on home turf now.
But suddenly it’s much darker again. That burst of moonlight has done for my night vision and the canopy is almost entirely closed in this part of the forest. I’m sweating and disturbingly think I see something move to my right. Was there a noise? Not looking where I’m going, I again trip over a low rock and find myself on my knees in the bilberry bushes and snow. Again a dull thud of a noise, and all that navigational confidence drains. Irrational fear returns. I should clamber onto my feet and speed through the trees as fast as safely possible, and get the hell out, but I need to own this experience. I need to reach down deep into my surroundings past my fear and touch the essence of the place. To know its face.
So I stand up. I decide to take my beanie off as it isn’t helping, muffling my hearing, dimming my vision even further, increasing the scratching sense of dread that encroaches at the periphery of my awareness.
And then I hear the branch snap. And my head snaps round a millisecond later. And, no word of a lie, I hear a piercing howl. Not very near, across the river somewhere, but it doesn’t help. I scan the trees nervously for movement, for animals. I’m cursing myself for leaving my puukko knife at home. I know there are wolves locally, predating on deer and moose, but here, so near to my home?
And then the howl comes a second time but this time it morphs from something ancient, primal and terrifying, stuttering back into itself and becoming a rhythmic barking. And I know that it’s not a wolf, it’s a husky, and I know where it lives.
I stand a little taller, breathe ostentatiously, look carefully left and right for the twig snapper, but see nothing. So I put my hat back on and trundle as casually as I can back down the hill, breaking out onto our own fields, crunching appreciatively through the capped snowfall and dried grass beneath.
Our cockerel crows from his night roost, confusing moonlight for dawn, and I hear that giddy tinkle again of two boys being joyful idiots in the snow. I stoop without pausing, scoop a glove of snow, round it off and hurl it with glee at my eldest. They both beam at me and retaliate in a white fury.
And for twenty minutes we’re silly under the warm, reassuring glow of an electric outside light.
