by Paul Bogard
Nonetheless, “for some parents we couldn’t get campus bright enough,” Chief of Police Regina Lawson explains. And surveys of the campus community tell her that “people are afraid, and feel that it’s unsafe to walk across campus in the dark.” It doesn’t seem to matter that, as she says, “the reality… is that we’re being robbed blind in broad daylight. The perception is that people should be afraid at night.” Lawson cites what she sees as the sensationalism of today’s media as heightening our perception of fear. “When I was in college you didn’t have that. You felt pretty invincible, because you weren’t getting that redundant, redundant, redundant replay of any acts of violence that took place.”
Consider this as well: Like so many college campuses in the United States, this campus is dotted with the silver poles of a “blue light system.” The idea is that if you’re in danger, all you have to do is get to a tower and press a button for help. When these systems were first finding their way onto college campuses in the mid-1980s, author Katie Roiphe raised the question of their effectiveness. She argued that rather than actually providing real security to university students, these lights created a culture of fear that taught students to be anxious about darkness, about strangers, about the night. As she wrote, “red means stop, green means go, and blue means be afraid.”
I wonder if she might be right. In a 2000 report titled “The Sexual Victimization of College Women,” researchers at the National Institute of Justice found that “the majority of sexual victimizations, especially rapes and physically coerced sexual contact, occurred in living quarters.” That is, not while the victim was walking across campus at night. “Almost 60 percent” of the rapes on campus occurred in the victim’s residence, 31 percent in other living quarters on campus, and 10.3 percent in a fraternity. (Perhaps the blue light systems ought to expand their reach, with towers in fraternity and dormitory lobbies?) Campus lighting, blue light systems, statistics telling us we ought not to fear being outside at night—and still we are afraid to be on campus after dark.
“I think we’re scaring the students more than we need to,” says Alty. “We have some crime on campus, but not much. So why are we telling students, ‘Oh, be careful, you gotta be careful’? Are we scaring them or sensitizing them? That line is blurry for me.”
With rare exception, we in America are born from darkness into brightly lit rooms and grow up in brightly lit cities and suburbs, our nights both inside and out lit by electricity. By the time we reach college we already know what night is supposed to look like, and so we accept glary lights on campus because we assume they will protect us if we have to venture outside after dark. But lights alone don’t protect us—being smart about our actions and aware of our surroundings does. And what an opportunity lost: Rather than college being a time when we become more appreciative of night’s beauty and informed about the value of darkness, we spend four years having our previous assumptions reinforced—that night is dangerous and darkness a threat.
This is not to say that threats at night don’t exist, or that we have no reason to feel anxious. It’s an especially sad statement about modern Western civilization that women, in particular, are made to feel nervous being out at night.
“As a woman you’re constantly looking out, trying to maintain your safety,” admits Tiffany Bourelle, a professor at Arizona State University. “I don’t think it’s something anybody can recognize until you’ve been in that situation of fear.”
Bourelle and her husband, Andy, have joined me on Tempe’s “A” mountain to watch the moon rise over greater Phoenix. In the east, the deep dusky purple of Earth’s shadow; in the west, the setting orange sun—the city’s evening humming all around. The planes coming in to PHX pass directly overhead, all polished aluminum and engine whine, looking like big white flashlights strung loosely one after another in a long, loose chain stretching east until disappearing on the horizon. Except where they are broken by mountain shards rising from the desert floor, the lights sprawl in every direction to the horizon—the pink-orange of high-pressure sodium streetlights, the sharp green of stoplights, the bright white of empty parking lots. On a distant ridge, a forest of radio towers blinking red.
“If I’m alone in a parking garage late at night,” Bourelle continues, “I have my keys in my hand, with my key in my index finger ready, because that would probably be my only chance. And you guys probably don’t even think about that.”
Listening to her, I think of Rebecca Solnit citing in Wanderlust “the most devastating discovery of my life”: that she had “no real right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness out-of-doors.” She describes how in order to walk in the streets she “learned to think like prey, as have most women.” She cites one poll showing two-thirds of American women are afraid to walk alone in their own neighborhoods at night, and another poll reporting half of British women afraid to go out alone after dark and 40 percent “very worried” about being raped.
Yet, as on the university campus, is the danger real or perceived? In their article “The Gendered ‘Nature’ of the Urban Outdoors: Women Negotiating Fear of Violence,” Jennifer K. Wesely and Emily Gaarder studied “the ways that gendered constructions of public space, particularly the wilderness outdoors and urban-proximate areas, inform women’s assessments of vulnerability and fear in these spaces, or their ‘geography of fear.’ ” They found that “violence against women in the private realm far exceeds that in the public sphere,” and “the vast majority of sexual abuse, rape and battering occurs behind closed doors.” They argue, “Countless women are probably denied the healing benefits of wilderness because of the fear of rape behind every bush, around every corner—a fear that every woman in this culture has been taught along with Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.”
It doesn’t seem to matter what the studies or statistics say—we remember the California college student abducted from a friend’s apartment in Reno and found strangled weeks later on the edge of town, the University of North Carolina student body president kidnapped and killed. The rarity of these crimes doesn’t seem to diminish our fears. We remember the sensational cases, and we are afraid. That forty thousand of us die in traffic accidents each year doesn’t make us afraid of driving, but one rape or murder confirms every fear we have about night’s darkness, and keeps us from going outside at night.
“And it’s nothing that lights can cure,” Bourelle explains. “It’s because there are these stories out here, and every woman knows some woman that’s been attacked, that it doesn’t matter how many lights you put in a place—it’s always going to be dark at night and there’s always going to be shadows, and that one person in a million is going to get raped outside at night. So, there’s really no way to get around it—nighttime makes you feel vulnerable.”
When I hear that phrase I think of Bonnie, a friend in Albuquerque, who committed herself on New Year’s Day a couple of years ago to getting out to see each full moon of the coming year. It wouldn’t be enough to wave at the moon from through the kitchen window, Bonnie had to get out to an area dark enough that she could see her moon shadow. Her long-term relationship had just ended, and she was looking to reconnect with a part of herself she felt she’d given up, and to give herself a positive way of marking the passage of time rather than simply sitting at home waiting to feel better. Whether in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, the bosque of the city’s North Valley, mountain biking in southern Colorado, or cross-country skiing near Santa Fe, Bonnie made a point of getting out into the dark.
“People were always asking me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?,’ or discouraging me by saying, ‘It’s not safe,’ or, ‘What are you doing out at night?’ There’s this perception that the night is sooooo dangerous. But you’re much more likely to get assaulted in your home at night than you are out in the dark,” she tells me.
“Women are taught to fear,” she continues. “It starts with that mysterious female body stuff that guys are taught to be scared of but, really, wo
men are taught to be scared of as well. We’re taught to hide it, be ashamed of it, to not embrace it.” And part of teaching women to be afraid, Bonnie says, is teaching them to fear being out at night, that bad things are going to happen. “It’s much easier to control people who are scared, who won’t leave the house,” she argues. “It’s this manufactured fear that creates a perception that something bad is going to happen to you.”
The reality, she says, is that as you sit at home watching TV “something bad is happening—you’re getting sick, and you’re missing out.”
Without diminishing the reality of our fears, can we ask what we might be missing? Can we ask what’s lost? What do we lose—women and men alike—when we are so afraid of darkness that we never experience its beauty or understand its value for our world, while allowing our lights to grow ever brighter?
If ever-brighter lights were making us increasingly safe, that might be one thing. But as Eddie Henry, the man responsible for lighting one of London’s toughest boroughs, told me, true safety “is about having the right amount of light and the right type of light and the right color of light for the right place. Rather than, we’re just going to have loads of it!”
Far from being contradictory goals, lighting our nights for safety and controlling light pollution go hand in hand. In fact, one of the most compelling arguments for controlling our lighting at night is that by doing so we will actually make ourselves safer. Said another way, if we are truly concerned about the safety of our wives and daughters and mothers (husbands and sons and fathers), we will understand that light as we use it in most situations makes us less safe by impeding our vision, casting shadows where the “bad guys” can hide, and—perhaps most powerfully—creating the illusion of safety.
Lights can help make us safer, but real safety comes from being aware of our surroundings, making good choices, and not using our natural fear of the dark as an excuse to overlight our nights.
And that natural fear of the dark? I know it well.
I have been afraid of the dark since I was a child. For me it’s not a fear I feel in the dark of the city, or anywhere I’m with a friend. But in summer when I get back to our lake in the northern Minnesota woods, I remember. As a child at the lake I avoided camping at all costs, slept with a night-light, and dashed home from our nearest neighbors. Even now, after all I have learned about darkness, on nights I’m alone at the lake I will sometimes stand where our gravel road begins to climb and wind through the woods behind our house and find my legs refuse to go farther. During daylight this road is easy, but on nights when my hands disappear inches from my eyes, I can’t take another step.
A few years ago, I decided that if I could walk this road on a moonless night, I could overcome my fear. I knew all the rational reasons why I shouldn’t fear the dark, and I figured I just had to grow up and wrestle into submission my irrational fears, which had almost nothing to do with cougars, bears, and wolves, and almost everything to do with some deranged human somehow finding his way down this single lane in the Northwoods.
But I abandoned my experiment almost immediately, and I remember the moment I did. I was standing barefoot on the dock watching a waxing moon glow over the southern bay, its light on the water the most movement around, when from far back behind the house there came an eerie, wonderful howl—a sound I had never heard at the lake before. At first, my mind thought, coyote. Then, just as I thought, No, but what is it?, a shiver slid from my scalp to my heels.
I was twenty yards from our front door, the wolf staying deep in the woods. I knew—intellectually—that I wasn’t in danger, that no wolf would be interested in attacking me or anybody else. Yet the primitive fear remained—for both of us—and that gave me hope.
Let me explain.
Perhaps no animal has been more associated with devilish darkness, and dealt with more cruelly, than wolves. In western Europe, wolves have long been wiped out. And in the United States, these intelligent and social creatures have suffered a destruction that boggles the mind. From 1680—when William Wood wrote that there were far too many wolves (in New England!) to ever hope of doing anything about them—to the later twentieth century, the wolf population in the Lower 48 was reduced (trapped, shot, poisoned, stoned, burned, smoked out, drowned) to a handful of packs, cleared from nearly every state. Northern Minnesota is home to several thousand wolves, thanks to federal protection and intense human management. It’s a safe bet that, without this help, wolves would have been and would still be driven even from their last refuges.
I will readily admit that I am still, especially on windy nights or nights of thunder and lightning, afraid of the dark. But I have come to realize that appreciating darkness has little to do with my conquering fear and everything to do with accepting it. In fact, my fear of the dark—or at least the response it sparks inside me—is something I value. Standing at the bottom of the road is for me the equivalent almost of standing at the open door of an airplane a mile above farm squares. It quickens my heart and makes my blood rush around. That adrenaline, that excitement, that feeling of being alive—when I feel the stop signals in my legs, it’s the instinctual, natural, animal awareness in me. I don’t want fear so strong that I am incapacitated. But there is fear that comes from being attentive enough that you realize there is life greater than you, life that was here before you and will be after.
That is one reason I am standing in a dark desert canyon surrounded by mountain lions; Ken Lamberton is the other. I have wanted to visit Ken in southeastern Arizona ever since reading his essay about what darkness meant to him during his twelve years in prison. I wanted to ask what it meant to have darkness taken from you, to be barred from seeing it. I wanted to talk with him about freedom, and what we lose, if anything, when we don’t have access to darkness. And I wanted to know what it was like for him now to live in this dark desert canyon.
“One of the advantages of living out here is that you have this night sky,” Ken says, his curly black hair and mustache silver-tinged in the moon’s light. “When I was a kid I learned all the constellations and the stars. My first telescope, I must have been twelve or thirteen, I remember just looking for bright objects in the sky, and I pointed it at one, and I looked through the ocular and there was a planet with rings around it… Oh my gosh! Saturn. I was sold. Being out here now is like my childhood all over again.”
We are making our way down a single-lane gravel road, pebbles kicking out before us, rolling underneath. A low waxing crescent moon rests in the western sky, casting our shadows onto rocks and prickly pear and cholla.
“When I was locked up I used to really miss the stars. On those rare occasions when there would be some kind of event and they would send us out of the cells, and you could see the stars, it was like being released, it was like being free. I mean looking up and seeing the stars, and not seeing any of that razor wire, not seeing any of those fences, and knowing that it’s just light-years of space.”
I don’t know the whole story of why Ken was in prison. I’ve heard he made a mistake, and that maybe there was a judge who wanted to send a message. I know Ken’s written about prison in his books. I know his wife, Karen, stayed with him the whole time, and that they have three grown daughters. I know Ken exudes kindness and care for the natural world. Before I read Ken’s story, I hadn’t considered the idea of having no access to darkness, of being forced to be in the light. He writes of floodlights on the prison yard creating “a hazy smog of light,” and “the lights snapping on with an electric whine as dusk settled upon our cordoned backlot of desert south of Tucson.”
Extinguishing the light in my cell only allowed the bright hallway outside my windowed door to lay a column of chalky alabaster across my face. Blocking the window risked a disciplinary write-up. Covering my face invited a rude wake-up. Too many times the rapping of a flashlight on the glass disturbed my sleep as some guard on graveyard shift attempted to get me to show some skin so he knew I was real and not a stuffed blanket.
> Even in the housing units, he writes, “we had no escape from the security of light.”
We start our walk from Ken and Karen’s small stone house, walking north past a few other houses, shielding our eyes at the one bright house, then walking without streetlights, walking with moonlight instead. Ken says, “If you want to get into some really dark walking, we could go down along this gully. We could follow an old mule road down to the bottom of the hill.”
I tell him I’m all for it, as long as the lions don’t care.
Earlier in the evening, Ken had shown me photos of the lions he’d photographed by remote sensor. “The first time I developed the film in Tucson, Karen went to pick up the prints and she was like, ‘So where again is this exactly?’ And I said, ‘I don’t believe it, there’s mountain lions a hundred yards from our house!’ ”
As we descend into the gully, the stars condense to only straight overhead as bushes and trees surround us and darkness rises on four sides. I’m trying to stay close behind Ken, the wind whistling in the juniper trees and our boots crunching gravel.
But I’m thinking, too, of Aldo Leopold’s essay “Escudilla,” from his book A Sand County Almanac, the story of a mountain not too far from here that used to be home to a grizzly—before a government trapper killed him. When I first read the essay, I was living in Albuquerque, and as soon as I could I drove down and hiked Escudilla—a country full of solitude and southern Arizona mountain beauty—and saw not a single person. Luna and my friend Rachel and I were the only ones there among the pines and aspen. And I remember thinking how different it would have been if I’d known there was a grizzly sharing that mountain.
“Yep,” Ken says, “we don’t see them, but they see us.”
The fear that causes us to overlight the night and keeps us from appreciating darkness also keeps us from the value of fear. And just as I’m not about to bungee-jump off a canyon bridge, I’m not about to take chances in a crime-ridden part of town. But to hike in a grizzly’s footsteps or a canyon with cougars, or to seek out the full moon, or to stroll through a beautiful city at night, is to know a fear that enlivens and, I think, enlightens.
