The Night

By Erik Hogan

Science may explain the night to us. It describes an aspect of the spherical Earth rotating away from the illumination and warmth of the sun’s light. In those hours of facing the emptiness of space, darkness covers that part of our planet, diminishing ambient light and cooling off the atmosphere. But the Earth continues to rotate and, invariably, the hours of visibility and warmth return.

This does not even begin to portray the human experience of the night. Beginning with the dwindling of daylight, as vibrant as a sunset may be, an anticipation grows. The coming darkness brings at least a hint of fear, despite our resolve or bravado. Predators lurk beyond the limits of sight. There may be monsters, our own kind, or both.

Our tendency is to draw in, to become quiet unless we gather inside around our own light. Most often we build what comfort and security we can before sleeping through it. Dreaming through it. But the darkness out there remains. A domain of mystery in which incalculable stars in the blackness above defy explanation. An obscure world in which myths relay warnings of goblins and ghosts.

Sometimes it becomes one’s duty to venture out into the night. To do so imparts familiarity and a perspective on a significant part of life that many do not encounter. To an extent, humans are built for disruption, to be challenged and to overcome. Perhaps it can be beneficial to us in some way, at least on occasion, to experience the night?

My own experience of the night is far reaching and familiar. As a teen I snuck out of the house, but not for partying or trouble making. I would simply walk in the back yard, looking at the moon and its silvery beams glimmering on the dark waters of the lake I lived on, wrapped in wonder at what the life ahead held in store.

Camping, whether alone or with friends, I often laid out supine in the darkness. The vast display of stars spread above me, always obscured by the light and haze of civilization back home. I remember feeling not so much that I was looking up, but rather as if I were stuck on the bottom of the Earth, suspended above a vast emptiness below.

In college I worked delivering bread to local restaurants. This involved getting up, sorting orders, and shuttling them around town well before any hint of the dawn. Empty streets, the quiet, and slowly fading dark. It was the remnants of the retreating night, but night none the less.

Working in the emergency medical services came with working night shifts, and I hated it then. Trying to sleep through the day. Grinding through the dark hours, waiting for the next horrible event calling for a rescue.

But by the time I became a police officer I had a young family and the schedule worked. I chose nights. I would sleep while everyone was at school or work and have time to spend with them in the evenings before my shift began.

Ten years I worked nights. Longer than almost anyone else I knew of. It was hard. Not just for me, but for my family, too. But the experience was incomparable to anything else. It taught me friendship with brothers and sisters in blue doing our best to hold the world together in the wildest events imaginable. There were times of terror, of testing of ultimate limits, and also quiet times of contemplation.

Always, no matter what else occurred, the darkness eventually gave way to the coming day. I, who watched the sun disappear the day before and lived through the night, now watched it rise over the horizon again. There is no greater experience of awe.

Time flies. For almost another decade I have been on a daytime schedule. The routine of being awake during the day and sleeping through the dark hours is hard to turn back away from. Though I tend to rise early, I cannot count it as truly experiencing the night.

We recently had an overnight training session for woodland operations using newly acquired night vision technology. Say what you will about the militarization of the police. I can tell you that there are real threats in the night and cops are the only people out there confronting them. Losing is not an option.

The experience of staying awake overnight after all this time was well met. Not easy, but familiar. Comfortable, even. The training was grueling- wearing a night vision monocle with no depth perception while bushwhacking through overgrown ravines and gullies with temperatures still in the mid 80’s and humid at 2 am. Rarely have I been so sweat drenched and exhausted. Type 2 fun, they call it.

In retrospect the overnight training was invigorating. And this leads me to wonder if such things are better for us, in the longer term. I’m talking about disrupting a schedule to experience the night. Epictetus might refer to this as “a hard winter’s training.”

Humans have evolved to handle a constant flux of stress. Hunting for food, defending against predators, times of plenty and times of scarcity. We meet challenges and recover and adapt and therefore are better off in facing the next challenge. Modernity is doing its utmost to remove this disruption and variance from our lives. It courts us with offerings of ease, pleasure, and convenience. We come to expect this and abhor variation.

But a monotonous life of predictable mediocrity in the modern world puts us in a very fragile state. We become easily fractured by unforeseen events and, given enough time, those events always come.

Perhaps we can counter this by living a bit more disorderly life? One that offers variability, unpredictability in the day to day. This is certainly a harder road, so why? Because it offers growth through adversity and the ability to thrive amid chaos. It may be the only path to becoming a truly fulfilled human being. And at the very least, it won’t be boring!

On occasion we should attempt to overcome the inconvenience and disruption. We should consider seeking out the night.

Erik Hogan is an Athens police officer whose photography focuses on capturing the beauty of nature.