I’m really getting to like running in the night.

Ran in the dark for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

I went south a little after sunset on our semi-rural country road. It’s got a yellow line down the middle (That’s it up there on top of the blog). It’s mostly horse farms and golf courses down that way so there’s some commuter traffic, but not much. If you see three cars together, it’s a lot. Manakin road is a good running road.

The only thing I worried about was getting hit by a car. I put on a reflective vest and hoped for the best. It was cold. I wore a fleece cap and learned new respect for the term “deer in the headlights.”

That reflective vest is a good way to keep visible. But when the first fifty mile an hour BMW with xenon high beams blasted the eyeballs out the back of my head, I found a whole different set of issues that a baseball cap could help solve.

Blindness is not always dark. Blindness can be very, very bright. It also confuses and disorients. You don’t know where the road is, you don’t know where the ditch is, and you don’t know where your feet are. The deep instinctive part of my brain knew that a misstep and a millisecond in one direction could mean death and in the other broken bones and torn ligaments.

After the xenon explosion passes, your eyes are still trying to adjust to the sudden brightness and the result is the darkest dark you will ever know. It’s like Milton’s description of hell: “Darkness, visible.”

I can be a resolute runner. When in the zone, I prefer not to stop. The first few xenon blasts, I pushed through the blindness and trusted to luck and reflexes. Cursed myself for not wearing a baseball cap. But soon rationality triumphed over doggedness and I just gave up. Saw it coming, stepped into the ditch, closed my eyes and let it pass.

This all sounds pretty terrible and you’re likely wondering how in hell I can say I’m getting to really like running in the night. The second time was a lot better.

It’s about 35°. I wear a ball cap, shorts, long-sleeve t-shirt and vest. It’s after 7pm. The commuters are home and the sky’s clear and starry. There’s less than half a moon, but it’s bright. This time I go north.

Just north of our place is an enclave of black families. They’ve likely lived here for a hundred fifty years. The “old negro schoolhouse” is in the woods right next to our place and it’s now a little rental bungalow with a bright red working hand pump in the side yard. Sanitized reminder of a near distant time whose spasmodic and reluctant death is still remembered clearly by the older ones among us.

I run in the darkness through the neighborhood of organically grown homes. White church and graveyard on the left. A small home of painted concrete block. A wide an expansive one, bricked and wrought ironed. Here’s one with a new Mercedes in the driveway and another with a rusting tractor trailer hunkered in the weeds. It’s that kind of neighborhood. Old families with long roots.  

The houses are near the road and lighted windows confirm a life daylight just implies. There’s a late-season Christmas tree in one window, otherwise the colors have all gone gray and the smell of wood smoke is in the air. The road looks like a flat charcoal river, but it’s not flat at all. It’s ribby and pimpled, pitted, boiled and roily. Headlights coming up behind throw shadows on the imperfections and blow the secret. All the while, a womb-like darkness presses in close and intimate.

I follow the white line on the pavement’s edge. Nature is silent. It’s wintertime. The insects are dormant and noisy birds gone. I hear my feet on the pavement and nylon swishing of my shorts. Water sloshes quietly in my CamelBak. My breath ties all the sounds together in a rhythmic opus. I’m huffing pretty good by now as I turn left and slightly uphill past the new Hindu temple.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that the Hindu temple is on the edge of the black neighborhood. I heard the Hindus fought the county for a while before they got their permits. There’s a big white fence around the property so you can’t easily see its pastel pinkness. Rumor is they have a cow in there.

Further west there’s more cows. Lots of them. Beef cattle on the right and more organic homes on the left. The beeves startle but curious and unafraid run with me along the wire fence, ear tags bobbing. It gets darker as clouds slide in and cover the moon. The temperature is perfect. I leave the beef behind and trees arc over the road while the sour stink of dairy farm creeps down a lane. Tall pines on either side of the lane focus the smell so it lasts only a minute or so and is gone.

My body is warm and the rhythm of everything just sweeps me along. Legs move on their own without any conscious effort. I feel coolness only on the front of my knees, back of my arms and newly de-bearded chin.  Darkness masks the world’s details and I float along the road towards the turnback point.

As I head for home it begins to sleet. I don’t see it or feel it. I hear it crackle on the dead leaves in the ditch and the hedgerow. My mind has disassociated from my body and each exists in its own separate moment. The sleet doesn’t matter either; it’s simply another fact of the night and I’m really getting to love running in the night.

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