A couple of weeks ago I went to a waterpolo match between the men’s national teams of the USA and Italy. My university in California hosted the event. If you don’t know anything about waterpolo, it looks like a cross between rugby and soccer and is played in an Olympic-sized pool by massive men in Speedos and shower caps. I’ll leave that without commentary, although when I looked up whether to refer to the contest as a match or a game, I found this on Wikipedia: “The team with the most goals at the end of the game wins the match.” That, too, I’ll leave without commentary.
My point is not about waterpolo and how the Americans won but what happened afterward. I went to the event with friends from New York and we had drinks and dinner afterward. Even though we finished late, I left my car at the university and walked home. I do that a lot, since I live just under three miles from campus and like the exercise.
Some people may find walking after midnight strange, even dangerous, but I am used to it. I’ve walked late at night in places as diverse as the Bronx, Washington, DC, Manila, Istanbul, Abidjan, Nairobi, Guatemala City, San Salvador, Rome, Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo, and places in between.
I’m not bragging. In fact, it’s a miracle nothing happened to me in any of those places. I chalk it up to a combination of divine protection and what self defense experts call “situational awareness.” Still, I may have gotten out of some scrapes through cluelessness rather than awareness. A stroll through a housing project in the Bronx comes to mind. Of course, I had to do it with a five-hundred dollar, leather book bag just to make things interesting. It’s possible that I really do become invisible at times like those (see Ye Olde Cheese Shop).
Not all of my night walking has been in the city. I’ve roamed the hill country of southern Italy where wild boars snorted in the bushes. I’ve wandered the pine barrens of South Jersey guided only by a sliver of moon. I’ve walked on an unlit, gravel road around a lake in Tikal, Guatemala convinced that a big cat stalked me. Whether jaguar or cougar, I do not know. Nor did I care. I scanned the trees overhead and protected my neck until I made it back to my cabin.
Sometimes when I walk at night I think of Freddie Gonzalez. He was one of the boys from Willowbrook State School my grandmother cared for (see “McNamara’s Boys”). I remember spending the night at my grandmother’s once and Freddie coming back late that night cut up and bleeding. He had been in a fight and someone pushed him through a storefront window. I had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I pitied him because of his injuries. On the other, I admired him for being “out there” on city streets. It took courage and he suffered the consequences with my grandmother and the school.
You might be tempted to think that the differences between night walking and day walking have to do with the contrast between light and dark, work and rest, coming and going. Those differences exist, to be sure, but the night is more nuanced than that. As I walk and–eventually–sweat, I remember events and people from my past, some of whom I will never see again, which saddens me. Night walking gives me a chance to do what the Jesuits call an “examen” or review of the day with its good and bad events as well as the role I played in both.
Night walking makes you aware of life and death. You see things at night that you’d never notice in the glare of day. You hear things that daytime drowns out. You peer into the dark, into those quiet corners where death resides. And, like death, night walking is intimate and intense at the same time. With nearly every step you feel the weight of your own mortality.
Image credits: feature by Simon Launay; city street by Patrick Tomasso. Like fiction? Check out the Mercury “trilogy” (The Gringo, Laura Fedora) here. Also, go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”
These days, I’m not sure I would feel at all comfortable walking at night, but I did appreciate the reminder of the “examen” that was recommended by Jesuits, Oblates and who knows what other religious orders and writers.
For that, it is not necessary to walk, I don’t think, but it is important to be alone, and in a quiet place.
In fact, the same quiet isolation is ideal for the “preparation for the day” and morning meditation, with very useful exercises.
I appreciate your ability to stimulate my thinking, Robert. You almost always do.
Your best writing since the junior high dance and the couch. I too walk, with abandon, in and around various places i probably should not. Vulnerability is the word. In the dark, diurnal animals are at a disadvantage. And places such as Tikal and Guatemala City are to be respected as they are representative of rural and urban jungles. Death is a component of both.
Appreciate that, George. There’s been a theme here lately, what with walking and sneakers…I’ll have to think about that. There’s also something going on with blending into the night…
I miss being able to walk and take subway anywhere
There’s now a Second Avenue line. It would have been convenient…