The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  A hand-painted sign on the gate outside Annie’s small house reads, “The Witch Is In.” She says one of the carriage drivers likes to bring tourists by and tell them, “It’s me mother-in-law lives there.” In her sixties, with sandy brown hair and a raspy voice, she snaps her cigarette lighter open and shut while we talk. “Can I offer you anything?” she says. “Coffee, tea, whiskey?” She’s part of the small group of Sark residents who made the push for the dark sky designation. “The stars here are amazing,” she says as we look out her picture window, the only lights in the dim room two white candles burning. “The other night, it was like Van Gogh’s Night Café. And I don’t know—maybe I’d had a bit to drink—they all looked as if they were huge and glowing. I had to hang on the side of the house because they were making me dizzy.” She laughs her raspy laugh. “The best thing to do here on a really good night is go and find a field somewhere and just lie on your back and look up. And first of all you’ll see three hundred or four hundred stars, and then the more you look, the more you see, until the whole sky fills with them.”

  She came here from London in the 1970s and found a darkness unlike she’d ever known. “When I first got here, I thought, this is like going back five hundred years. And it is—the blackness is like velvet here. But it’s an embracing kind of darkness—it’s not at all scary. It’s like being asleep while you’re awake.”

  With no cars or trucks on the island—only tractors for farmers during the day—darkness brings a hush to the fields and carriage lanes. Annie says she will wake up and wonder, What’s that noise?—only to realize it was the sound of her eyelashes brushing against the sheet. “Because it’s so dark,” she explains, “you can actually hear little tiny sounds like that. It’s wonderful. You get true rest. You wake up with the sun. It makes you much more acutely aware of your own pulse, your own life flow.”

  She loves Sark, she says again and again. “It’s such a safe place to be. As a woman, I can go out to a concert on the island, and I can walk home at midnight all by myself, a mile and a half across the island and I don’t worry at all. If the moon is shining, I just walk in the moonlight. Otherwise, my trusty old torch.”

  Of being a witch, she says, “I am what I am, I do what I do. A witch is a wise woman, literally. Historically, they were the healers, the midwives, the people that actually looked after communities. It’s an ancient earth religion, pantheistic, lots of gods. I can go out here into my garden at midnight and have a little say to whatever I want to. I can walk out star-clad, naked.”

  Annie finds that watching the starry Sark sky gives her perspective. “You think, What am I? I’m a flea on an enormous animal. It really does put you in your place. But we are arrogant, we are shortsighted, we don’t consider our own future, because we don’t consider anything else’s future either. It makes me wither inside when I think that I’m a human being and I’m part of that process. It’s like a sculpture that’s going wrong. Who are the gods that are sculpting us? They’re making a monster of us, really.”

  Then she laughs again. “Don’t worry, Paul. That’s just me being witchy now. I get a bit like that this time of night.”

  After talking with Annie, I navigate back to my cottage on my ancient bicycle, down single lanes through the hedgerows, wind whipping here and there, darkness all around. The larger part of the island where Annie lives is called Big Sark, and my bed tonight is on Little Sark. To get there I need to cross “La Coupée,” a narrow strip of land high above the rocky coast, on a nine-foot-wide pathway built by German prisoners of war in 1945. Before railings were built at the turn of the century, to avoid being blown 250 feet to the rocky surf on windy nights like this, children made the crossing on their hands and knees.

  Back to the cottage I drop my bike, struck at first as much with the lights of Guernsey, ten miles east, as with the dark of Sark. But when I walk into a nearby hillside field, the glare from Guernsey blocked by the slope, I realize what makes Sark unique: While the Sark sky is impressively dark, the land is even darker. The ocean surf, the whirl of wind, the baaa of sheep out in this field—I can hear all this but can see only the shapes of sleeping cottages, no lights in or out, and, where the roofs end, the stars begin. For, just as Annie predicted, the sky has begun to clear on the horizon around me.

  These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere or—especially these days—by pollution. The single-lane gravel roads between hedgerows, the sleeping horses in the barns. This island takes you back in time—not only through the absence of cars and trucks but because of these stars at the edges of Earth.

  And, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren’t clearing and aren’t going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There’s the primal recognition, my soul saying, Yes, I remember. With cliffs all around I feel as if I am on a pedestal set among the stars.

  Tomorrow I will head to Guernsey, a bobbing diesel-churned journey, and find cobrahead fixtures, unshielded lights, the insistent roar of the motors that rule our lives. But tonight in a field on Sark, I lie staring up—and around—at the starry sky, a man on his back in a field, all but disappeared.

  When Aldo Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac, he placed his “land ethic”—his argument that we ought to treat the rest of creation as ethically as we hope to treat other humans—at the heart of his book, and at the heart of the land ethic he placed the idea of community. Leopold believed the reason humans are so shortsighted in our treatment of the natural world is that we do not see ourselves as part of a community with it. He argued that, while we have made great strides over the centuries toward expanding our notion of the human community to include a wider range of race, gender, and ethnicity, we have not made the same adjustment for the land. “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,” he wrote. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Leopold believed it was not enough to only value those members of a community who provided obvious economic value, such as deer or pine trees, because “most members of the land community have no economic value” or no easily defined value. Instead, Leopold argued for valuing the whole—that every member of the community is valuable, whether we understand that value yet or not—and for acting accordingly. “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient,” he advised. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.”

  Working in the desert Southwest during the first decades of the century, Leopold would have known fantastic darkness. Even when he moved to Wisconsin in 1924 he would have known real night while at “the shack,” his retreat forty miles outside Madison. Darkness doesn’t show up explicitly in his writing, but Leopold would have understood the costs of losing it. To value darkness would be to follow his desire for us to enlarge the boundaries of our community. Ecologically this is vital: If we truly value nocturnal and crepuscular creatures, for example, then we won’t allow our artificial lights to destroy their habitat. Leopold’s thinking applies too in that the values of darkness aren’t always economically obvious. How do we quantify the value of the darkness that provides passage for migrating sea turtles or shorebirds? Or the darkness that hosts the starry sky that might inspire the next Van Gogh?

  We have not yet learned to think about artificial light as Leopold would have us do. That is, as an ethical choice: Do we care that our lights shine into our neighbor’s bedroom? Do we care that our lights dilute the darkness on which bats and moths and migrating birds depend? Do we continue to ask more and more predominantly minority citizens to work through the night, knowing
full well the health risks they assume? My sense is that we so take for granted electric light that, not only do we forget how amazing it is or how beautiful it can be, but we are unaware how our use of light affects the rest of our community.

  This is not what I expected to find.

  In almost every way, it’s better. The mountainous country covered with a thick forest of sugar maple and yellow birch, fir, and pine, crisscrossed by hiking trails and haunted by creatures as ephemeral as luna moths and as regal as moose. But in one significant way, it’s worse: There are no stars here. There is incredible darkness—when I step from the observatory with my host I cannot see my hand before my face, and even after talking together for twenty minutes in that dark, he is only a vague shape three feet away. Unfortunately, Mont-Mégantic Starry Sky Reserve lies completely socked in with fog, rain, clouds thick as wool. I’ll not see any stars while I’m here, but I will leave thinking that, in some ways, Mont-Mégantic is the most impressive place I’ve yet been.

  Located in southern Quebec, just across the border from Maine, Mont-Mégantic National Park (Parc National du Mont-Mégantic) is home to the IDA’s first Dark Sky Reserve, created in 2008. The IDA calls its “reserve” designation “the epitome of IDA’s mission” and describes a Dark Sky Reserve thus: “working to preserve a central core that is valuable because of its natural light, communities band together to create public awareness campaigns and conduct retrofits to restore the night sky.” The definition sounds as if it were written to conform to what Mont-Mégantic has done, rather than the other way around. Mont-Mégantic has made itself a model for future initiatives to protect darkness and night skies while meeting the needs of twenty-first-century human communities.

  It’s like a whole different country up here. Coming north from the States, the change is immediate—everyone speaks French; even the road signs are in French. Of course, I knew this would be the case, and I find it a pleasure, but the difference in language belies an independent streak that applies to the reserve as well. For one thing, the sign as you enter does not read “Dark Sky Reserve,” but “Réserve internationale de ciel étoilé”—International Starry Sky Reserve, which the MM folks think sounds more positive. More significantly, they are doing things here that almost no others are doing. Over the course of less than a decade, Mont-Mégantic has managed to enlist the support of more than sixteen different local communities for their dark sky efforts, put into place laws governing lighting, replace more than three thousand lighting fixtures in those communities, and introduce the concepts of light pollution and dark skies to more than five hundred thousand visitors. As a result, despite lying only a hundred miles east of Montreal (the second largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in all of North America), the skies over Mont-Mégantic remain Bortle Class 3 dark.

  The Starry Sky Reserve consists of a scientific observatory (built in 1978, and still the largest and most powerful on the eastern seaboard of North America); a “popular” observatory, built in 1998; and the ASTROLab, built in 1996, which features displays, movies, guided talks, and tours. As we stand talking outside the popular observatory, my host, Bernard Malenfant, tells me that when he arrived here thirty-three years ago, he needed to carry a flashlight to work on the outside edges of the observatory, but twenty years later, he no longer needed the help—the light pollution in the skies overhead had more than doubled. Now, after the success of the past few years, “the sky is nicer here than it was in 1978. And, because it’s a regulation, a municipal law, people just can’t put up lights anymore. In two hundred years we might be the last place where it’s still dark. Hopefully not. There will always be the Atacama Desert in Chile, but a place where people are living and the sky is still dark? It’s a long-term project, but one of our goals is to preserve the sky for our children’s children.”

  Much of the credit for this success goes to the self-effacing and jocular Malenfant. Though he claims to be merely the night custodian, his role as chairman and founder of the ASTROLab has gone far beyond such basic work: Malenfant has had a hand in making each of the reserve’s buildings become a reality. In fact, the ASTROLab, which now hosts packed shows throughout the summer, was his idea. He says he realized the need after seeing how many visitors were “driving five hours from Quebec City, looking through the telescope for five minutes, and driving back home.” The Starry Sky Reserve now features a dark sky festival in July and a meteor festival in August and welcomes tens of thousands of visitors every year. It’s this public outreach that makes Mont-Mégantic unique. Yes, it’s dark here in part for the scientific observatory, which is owned collectively by two universities. But many dark sky places can claim that fact. What’s different about Mont-Mégantic is that, while many other dark sky locations focus first on an observatory, with any benefits to the public secondary, here that feels reversed.

  In truth, major astronomical observatories can be pretty boring to visit. They are often tough to reach and have limited, if any, public visiting hours. Even if there is a public telescope, the experience can too often be as Malenfant described: a long drive there, a quick look, a long drive home. But every year, Mont-Mégantic hires a crew of college students, many of them astronomy majors or simply young people with excitement for the stars, to serve as guides at the ASTROLab and popular observatory. The effect is that every visitor has the opportunity for personal interaction with someone who’s not only knowledgeable about the universe but enthusiastic as well. While Mont-Mégantic has made its displays and its movies both entertaining and enlightening, it’s this personal connection that draws so many visitors each year—and then draws them back. For many of the visitors, especially those from the cities, a visit to Mont-Mégantic is an opportunity to experience what was for thousands of years the common human experience of being together with other people under a starry sky. For the guides, too, Malenfant tells me; many come back every summer even if they have moved on to other jobs, simply to enjoy the experience of being with others under the Milky Way, or around a campfire exchanging stories and songs through the night.

  As I listen to Malenfant describe these nighttime gatherings, I think of how darkness brings us together with those we love. So many of our most intimate, romantic, memorable experiences—a campfire in the woods, a candlelit dinner, time spent in a bedroom with a lover—are experiences we illuminate with flame or moonlight, with subtlety. During the day, we wear the bright light of the sun, see ourselves in the mirror, imagine what others think, and shy from revealing our thoughts, our body, our fears. But darkness allows us to lower our defenses—we can say what we want, do what we want. We have the opportunity to rely on other senses, on touch and taste and hearing. By providing the context for intimate light, darkness brings us closer.

  On Christmas Eve at the candlelight service in the downtown Minneapolis Lutheran church I grew up attending, near the end of the service the electric lights are drawn down and a flame passes from one person to another, candle to candle, until the entire sanctuary is lit only by candlelight. I remember once as a child noticing a blind man in the row ahead of us, holding his candle close to his face with both hands to feel the flame, his eyes closed, his smile.

  The small red Christmas lights my mother wraps on the tree each year, the maple-scented candle burning on my desk as I write, the fireplaces and campfires and moonlight I remember from years gone by, and the possibility of such experiences in years to come—it’s as though with the flick of a switch, a room’s sudden bright, all are erased.

  The emphasis at Mont-Mégantic on connecting the public to darkness took a big step forward with the hiring, in 2003, of Chloé Legris as outreach coordinator. Originally hired on a six-month contract, Legris stayed five years, and for her efforts was named Scientist of the Year in 2007 by Radio-Canada. Trained as an engineer and blessed with natural charisma, Legris worked tirelessly to connect the goals of the park with the realities of the local communities. Remarkably, when she began her job she knew next to nothing about dark
skies. But as she began to learn, she says, she “fell in love with the project.” She also quickly realized that she would have to work hard to be taken seriously. “I was not emotional about stars and dark skies,” she says. “I approached it in a pragmatic way. If I were an electrician, what would I care about? I wasn’t trying to sell to people, I just told them it was logical. Pragmatic people don’t want to hear about the problem, only how to solve it. The electricians told me, ‘Don’t talk to me about astronomers. I like to fish and I like to see the stars, so how do we do this?’ ” Over the course of nearly six years, Legris went “everywhere” in the area surrounding Mont-Mégantic, meeting with politicians and business leaders, conducting training sessions on good lighting, urging communities to adopt lighting regulations, and raising money to pay for the retrofitting of existing lights. “We took care of everything,” she says. Because the power company Hydro-Québec had a federal mandate to become more energy-efficient, the company had set up a fund for new approaches to using less energy, and changing lights and light fixtures fit the bill. A significant part of Legris’ work was simply helping local people to appreciate the breathtaking skies they see every night. “It’s teaching people we have something special here,” she says. “For them, it’s just normal. What do they want to see? They want to see a McDonald’s in their town. I’m joking, but it’s not so far from the truth,” she laughs. Nonetheless, her efforts began to sink in, sometimes in amusing ways. The mayor of Notre-Dame-des-Bois, a tiny community at the foot of the mountain, told her that his mind changed when he was driving one night in the country. “It was really funny,” she says. “He stopped on the road to pee, and he rose his eyes in the sky and he thought, It’s true, it’s so beautiful what we have. And I didn’t realize how much I appreciate it because I see it all the time.”