NIGHT STUFF

My naps are precious to me: gourmet sleep. Yesterday I had one of my best naps. This flu cycles on and on like World War I, control ebbing and flowing between my macrophages and the viri, so I’m mostly tired. Having completed a piece for WoodenBoat I took my little fleece blanket and walked into the Big House backyard. I rolled into the rope hammock at the far end of the yard, tucked the blanket up under my head, covered my eyes with my battered Panama hat, and slept for an hour in the gently swinging hammock. The air was like wine, the temperature perfect, and breeze light, and the sun was filtered through leaves. God smiled on me and I slept as peacefully as a boy.

This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.

Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.

The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.

The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.

Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.

It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.

The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.

My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.

It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.

Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”

THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.

The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.

The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.

CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.