Pop 89: Night Preserve

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

When friends in other places ask me about where I live, the first things I brag about are the dark and the silence. “Val Marie, Saskatchewan,” I say, “is the gateway to Grasslands National Park - the darkest Dark Sky Preserve in Canada.” (Sometimes I add that Wood Buffalo National Park is the largest.) parks.canada.ca website says the preserves are a “commitment to protect and preserve the night.” What a radical thought.

The renowned author Sr. Joan Chittister travels from Erie, Pennsylvania, to a village in Ireland for three months every year to write. She does so, she says, because in that small village, “night remains night.” The problem in this culture, she says, “ is that we have destroyed night. Even night is all light and noise and activities now. Loss of night is a loss of human soul.“ Nowadays, what we no longer have naturally, we need to create. “Television and computers off, lights out, extra hours of quiet,” she lists. But who does that?

If the very thought of “living” exhausts me, I know it’s time for real rest and replenishment. The energy I seek does not come from stimulation, or empty calories, or caffeine but comes from darkness, silence and solitude.

Night and silence embrace each other in my village. You can’t say that of New York, where my friend Shelline swears that nonstop noise, more than anything, robs her of sanity and peace. In New York, no matter what time it is, someone is late for work or just starting work or working it. The city that never sleeps is alive in exciting ways, but a place that never sleeps never slows down is neither dark nor quiet. And in many cases, its inhabitants are more spooked by the quiet than by the sirens.

Where there’s noise and flashing lights, there’s usually speed. The poet and essayist David Whyte says: “The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after a while, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not travelling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence.”

I for one, get restless when I am tempted to measure myself against others. And such measuring will inevitably leave me either vain or bitter. When I compare my insides with someone else’s outsides, I come up short every time. Cities are notorious places full of opportunities to compare ourselves to all manner of supposed role models or standards of success and beauty.

The straw that finally broke this Hamel’s back was in the form of an ad. Walking up a long street on my way to work one day, I was confronted by a ground-to-rooftop image attached to Eaton Centre. It consisted of a young woman, her back to us. She was wearing a short skirt made of actual material that could be lifted in the slightest of breezes. So we all got a look at her bum every time the wind blew. How nice.

That day I was forced to face another depiction of womanhood on my way home: A Hooter’s ad with a pair of boobs filling the two Os of the restaurant’s logo. “It insults women and owls,” I grumbled and proclaimed to no one. “And it’s as insulting as if it depicted a grinning black man holding up a watermelon.”

Just in front of my apartment was a construction site. And posted on the fence was a union statement warning against harassment. The definition included being exposed to unsolicited and degrading images or behaviours. “Consumer culture is harassing us! This city is papered with degrading images!”

It’s not just absurd depictions of women. Consider those absurd billboards on your way to Banff or Jasper depicting - and blocking - the very mountains you are driving into. Someone recently sent me a picture of a giant eucalyptus tree being uprooted to make room for two billboards, one of them bearing an image of a little boy hugging a tree!

Living in the country, I have no illusions that folks here aren’t any less exposed or inured to degrading images on their computers or on their TVs. But we are not assaulted by over-lit billboards and bus shelter ads and subway walls and entire sides of buildings. No one would dare mar this land with such abominations. What I gaze upon every morning is the sun rising over the golden sage-covered hills, where deer and sometimes antelope, and regularly cattle, graze. And they are not in any big hurry.

And at night, I am stupefied by the sea of stars - almost frightened by the immensity of it and the fact of my own minor part in the cosmos. But I remain staring upward until the fear passes and eventually turns into awe, and some nights even relief. Some nights an owl hoots into the silence. Most nights, coyotes yip. But otherwise, nothing comes crashing down to break my star-gazing. No sirens, no traffic, no noisy bars or neighbours.

Which brings me to my other bragging point: silence. Ok, in the summer, you have to get up early, before the racket of birdsong, to absorb the silence. Which is what acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton did when he came to Grasslands National Park to measure levels of noise and found that this place had the lowest levels in North America. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating daily, because daily noise hammers us into dull-headed beings living on automatic, not much different from AI. I repeat it because, while I still have a choice between an artificial approximation of the natural world and The Living Natural World, I chose the latter, which still thrives just outside my door.

Silence and darkness help liberate me from measuring myself against life; they help me to live life. Here at night, I am released from restlessness into restfulness. Long live the night.

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