Holy Evening

I will admit I don't know when exactly this began, but for centuries, people have enjoyed celebrations of autumn by lighting fires.

So far, on this year's celebration of holy evening, I’ve already pushed a few wheelbarrows full of wood, stacked them inside and out, the fireplace is roaring, the wind is howling, causing tree branches to bang on the roof, the waves are pounding the rocky shore, and for the first time in nineteen years we have a full moon on Halloween.

I was a seventeen year old high school student the last time we had a full moon on this special day, and I can’t even remember if it was a clear night or not.  I do know that my girlfriend was easily spooked, claimed she had seen ghosts in her house, and loved horror films.  I most definitely didn’t love scary movies, having been quite jittery and nervous as a child.  I’ve got to thank her though.  She not only taught me about how to deeply care about another human and how to rebound from a breakup, but also to face my fears by getting me to watch all the horror movies I had feared as a child.  They were weren’t so intimidating as a teenager.

I haven’t seen her in years, but I’ve continued facing my fears.  No one is ever completely free from fear, and that’s a good adaptation for survival, sanity and the welfare of others.  One thing we have done in my class quite a bit is discuss what we currently fear, and what we used to fear when we were younger and have now overcome.  The most memorable discussion was a specific week this past March, but I’ll get to that later.

When I was young, I used to be afraid of the dark, sleeping either in the bunk beds in my sister’s room or with a night light until I was 7 or 8.  When I turned eighteen, I discovered the joys of watching the stars on my back in a rowboat, or having a campfire alone in a field, and later, in my 20's, I learned the terrifying excitement of hiking alone at night in places where wild beasts lurk somewhere unseen.

Then there were spiders.  My sister once told me, at 2 or 3 years old, to jump in a hole, thinking she could get me out, and then ran away and abandoned me because she quickly understood she'd need my parents for that.  I don't remember any of this, but apparently all I could talk about after was the spider that was there with me.  Later, when I was six or seven, I wasn't afraid of just any spider, but of the exotic ones from the other side of the country.  My mom had to convince me that they’d have to cross the Verrazano Bridge to get to Long Island from the southwest.  “But what if they escaped from a pet store!” was always my response.

Yet, this whole summer I basically shared this cabin with spiders.  There’s no way to keep them out.  I’ll be cooking or doing the dishes and one will pop down right in front of my face, literally hanging by a thread, and I’ll say, “Well, hello there!”  They like to hide in my kayak, so I will be out on the lake late a night, paddling with both hands, and I will feel something crawl on my legs, or worse, on my hand, and I’ll just have to smile and wait for the tingling sensation to pass, because if I freak out and let go with one hand, we'd both go down.

I also used to be afraid of wild animals.  Not deer, squirrels, or chipmunks, obviously, but, once again, the exotic stuff.  Thing was, I eventually did lots of hiking in areas where there were potentially dangerous animals, and often at night, and I had to learn how to keep my cool when I would hear rustling or a branch crack or even a loud snort, because creatures always sound bigger than they are when it’s dark and you’re alone. 

At one of my first birthday parties after moving to the countryside, I was camping with other middle schoolers in one of the fields, and we heard a large pack of coyotes yipping and howling for about half an hour, and we were paralyzed trying to figure out what to do.  “Make a break for it and run home!”  “No, that’s what they WANT us to do!”  Recently, the same thing happened when I was having a fire alone, so I just started howling with them.  Which was definitely more fun than being afraid.

Last night was the coldest night since I’ve moved up here.  When I arrived to escape the pandemic in March, it was 26 degrees.  Last night it was 22.  The evening began simply enough, with a few beers and Johnny Cash IV in front of the fire.  But I had to keep the faucets at a steady drip, and we’ve never been here for temps under 25, so we weren’t sure how effective it would be in keeping the pump and the pipes from freezing.

Initially things seemed fine.  However, after flushing the toilet, I checked the pressure gauge on the tank, and noticed the water pressure wasn’t rising as fast as it used to when it would refill.  I figured we needed a new filter.  So I went outside and under the camp, through the cobwebs and ducking below beams to change the filter.  Then I spent a long time running the water to get the tank to refill to I could check to make sure there were no leaks.  Success.

After that, I went down to the water and out on the dock to take in the moon and the stars.  The water was completely placid, and there were no sounds of any kind.  But then I noticed movement nearby.  Something was trotting along the shoreline, and heading my way.  It was too big to be a cat, but not quite large enough to be a coyote.  Once I’d come down to go canoeing at night and found a large porcupine in my canoe.  That thing had an eye like a whale, and luckily let me get away without any quills.  But this new creature was no porcupine.  It had a thin snout and moved swiftly as it navigated the rocks.   As it approached, I figured it had to be a fox.  I’d just watched an episode of Northern Exposure the day before where they were going on a fox hunt, and Ruth Anne gives the fox sanctuary, and Maurice is all angry thinking he disappointed the foxy British aristocrat, but she wants him anyway, while Ed volunteers to pretend to be the fox for their hunt, to give Holling some kind of spiritual satisfaction.

Anyway, most creatures are afraid of humans, unless they're rabid.  I figured it would leave me be, but if it didn’t, I was out on the dock with nowhere to go except in the lake, an unwelcome prospect on a 22 degree night.  Luckily, it didn’t seem to notice me until it reached the edge of the dock, when it finally looked in my direction, did an immediate about face and ran back the way it had come.  It was a nice feeling, actually.  The fearsome danger was actually afraid of me.  I wasn’t that surprised, because in the Sahara desert, when I was stargazing, foxes strutted by several times without bothering me.  We can learn to live with FOX and have FOX not fear our contemplative presence, as long as we share in admiration of life together.

When I asked my students about their fears, some of them always say ghosts.  I was never particularly afraid of ghosts, but my girlfriend at seventeen was.  The first time I asked her out, she turned me down, and so my friend and I watched Clint Eastwood movies to cheer up, and I gave him a ride home, and then to avoid killing a living deer I veered to the side of the road only to smash into a telephone pole, which proceeded to snap in half and just barely fall to the right of the car and avoid snapping me in half.  My grandfather was a highway patrol man, and he told me a couple years before he died that he was just thankful his children were all still alive, having been in the war and seen many accidents.  Whatever it was, I went indoors and selected the best ghost song, "The Highwayman" by The Highwaymen.

I am not thinking about ghosts now.  Or spiders.  Or bears.  Or even the cold, which I assure you, is very present.

As you likely are, I am thinking about what we will decide in three days, a fear we are all facing.

We all face fear together, every single living life day, learning how to respond with loving bravery, kindness, intelligence along the way.