THE DARKEST OF THE DARK – David Sobieski
There are many vivid memories of growing up in a rural community in Wisconsin. One such stark memory is the intense darkness at night. On a moonless night, it was the darkest of the dark. While we had a yard light, it was never on if it wasn’t needed. Our remoteness of the farm meant there were no immediate neighbors, no other sources of lights. If our yard light was off, as was often the case to save electricity, there was no source of ambient light. I remember the milky way galaxy being well defines, spectacular and crystal clear. Planets jumps out at you, constellations played with your mind. The Big Dipper, Draco the Dragon, and all other others you remember seeing in the encyclopedia. In the winter, the hunter Orion watched over the snowy fields of the farm.
Granted, there may have been a light or two along the river road a mile south of us, and perhaps you could spot one along the county line road a mile to the west, but they were small are rare, and did little they ruin the beautiful sights of the nighttime sky. I remember one time even seeing the tapestries of the northern lights. These were the days before communication towers starting to dot the landscape.
Inside the house it wasn’t much different. Once the TV was off before bed, that was about it for light. Turning the light off might reveal a glow of a glow in the dark bedroom clock. Such clocks often used Radium, a radioactive element treasured for it’s glow-in-the-dark properties. Easy to see, but not bright enough to interfere with the night vision. All clocks were analog. There were no digital displays as they had not been in residential use. Phones and TV had no lights, no ‘instant on’ properties. Zippo. Zilch, Nada. If you wanted to turn on the tv to catch the weather, you first had to wait for all the internal vacuum tube to warm up before the picture tube could start showing the black and white picture.
Contrast that with today where there are tiny little lights (albeit LED’s} indicating status everywhere. A brief list may include cell phones, chargers, TV’s, DVD’s, refrigerators, microwaves, overs, smoke detectors, thermostats, power strips, UPS’s CO detectors, outlets, doorbells, coffee makers, modems, bridges, computers along with every peripheral device that it connected, blu-tooth devices, the list goes on and on. Our current house has a trash receptible motion sensing door with small lights to indicate power. It’s a sad day with even your trash can uses battery power. Nearly all these electronic drives did not exist in any home 50 years ago.
We did occasionally use a 110v night light. I don’t know what it was about those bulbs in those things but they seemed to be designed to burn your flesh if you touched the bulb.
Lesson Learned- I believe that one needs to spend serious time outside in the darkness to realize how insignificant we are in the big picture of the universe. You don’t fear darkness when it if part of your everyday life. You also learn that as dark as it gets, it is only temporary as light is around the corner. That is life on a dairy farm.