Let There Be Light—and Dark

I hate the light, the variety that robs the darkness of any wonder, any mystery... takes away its very existence.

I should modify that animus. Light serves a purpose, of course. It fuels our lives. Without it, perish the thought, we’d be in our dark shelters from sunset to dawn. No—the light I despise is the encroaching kind that erases the natural order of things, that disrupts circadian rhythms and the very metabolism of life that requires some measure of darkness. Light pollution affects a host of innocent creatures from migrating birds to nesting turtles. Even trees!

According to a March 2022 report out of the US Department of Energy, 83 percent of the global population lives under a light-polluted sky (mrvn.co/doe).

I grew up in northeast New Jersey, which was then very rural. New York City was 40-some miles away by crow flight, and at night our local darkness was total. Unless there was a full moon, you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Some very dark nights, I would negotiate the 500-yard trek to the top of the little hill near our home, seek out my favorite flat rock ledge, lie back, and watch the heavens. The stars cast the only light, save for an occasional shooting star. And as my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, the stars’ light intensified, the Milky Way became visible, and I marveled at the unimaginable distances I was trying to see but really could only fantasize about.

I didn’t know then what a light-year was or that the stars I saw twinkling and alive above me were evanescent objects, perhaps long dead—that I was seeing images cast eons and eons ago. Five billion light years is, as old characters from ’40s Westerns put it, “a far piece.” Zillions of zeroes.

Those memories flooded back 50 years later when I built my dream house on the western side of that little mountain. My hometown had become the vanguard of the Crabgrass Frontier, the far edge of Greater New York–New Jersey suburbia, but I owned enough land to let me pretend nothing had changed. Not another house in sight. Deep, dark nights. Wildlife and wind in the trees the only sounds.

My first night in my new home was in late April. The maples and oaks had yet to leaf out. No moonlight. Just stars. I dozed off but woke up startled. The mountaintop of my youth was bathed in an eerie light. It seemed like a fleet of cars were parked up there aiming their headlights right at me. I dressed and went to investigate, accompanied by Dudley, my faithful Dalmatian, sleepy but not wanting to be left out of any adventure.

No cars. But in those years of my absence, the world had closed in. The light, called sky glow, was almost bright enough to read by. Suburbia was creeping inexorably closer day by day. Greater New York–New Jersey was exploding westward at the rate of 100 yards a day, by one estimate. At that rate of expansion, Greater NY–NJ would soon be crossing the Delaware and eyeing Harrisburg. I would be a forested island washed over by a flood of humanity, with minimalls and all the other amenities endemic to suburban life, including floodlights to keep the dark away from all this valuable stuff. Omnipresent light erasing the dark.

The hardwoods leafed in soon enough and shielded me from the night’s glare, but autumn soon denuded them again. The light seemed even more pervasive and persistent. Every house of those suburban enclaves stood secure in its encasement of floodlights, warding off who knows what sort of evil doer that might be skulking in the dark. Lawnmower thieves? Tool shed bandits? These lights came on at dusk and stayed on until dawn.

And there was nothing I could do about it. Powerlessness isn’t comforting, especially to a curmudgeon like me. I was a victim of light pollution, ambient illumination that is both annoying and mostly unnecessary. One home had a light fixture over the garage door that never went off. Never.

In Maine, electricity is expensive. The state requires power providers to maintain miles and miles of poles and attached wires. It’s called delivery, and the charge on the bill is often higher than that for the power.

So Mainers tend to be much more judicious about their use of light. Motionactivated lights that shut off after a minute or so suffice.

Summer visitors, the folks “from away,” as natives call them, don’t seem as careful, but their night lighting does attract our mosquitoes, so the trade-off is worth it. Once the “away people” leave, darkness reigns again, just the way most of us like it.

The first place in Maine I visited billed itself as Sunrise Lodge, so named because it was at nearly the easternmost point in the United States. If you got up at 4:15 a.m. and looked eastward, you could think of yourself as the first person in the whole country to see sunrise. The downside was night, which also came lots earlier, say 3:30 p.m. come October.

But because there is no ambient light, the night skies are so stunningly brilliant they take your breath away and let your imagination go where it will. A star voyager in this vastness. Nothing but you and the dark. Perfection. The way, as we say up here in the North Country, life should be.

Ron dePaolo ’64 Penobscot, Maine

Ron dePaolo enjoyed a distinguished career as a journalist for Life and Business Week, and his articles have been published in Audubon, Smithsonian, and Outdoors magazines, among others.