By Irena Barbara Nagler

One Halloween, the night when barriers are said to dissolve between dimensions, as perhaps they do every night, my friend Marin and I took a ceremonial walk after dark through Bird Hills Nature Area. We stopped to read poetry and tell dreams at places we knew in the forest.

We carried a candle-lantern that cast more shadow than light. Sorcerous mantles extended from it, flickering and expanding. In the electric hush and rustling of the autumn woods, far more awake than somnolent, we were startled once by the voices of another group of celebrants clustered near the biggest oak tree. With its large, low-growing branches, it clearly began life before most of this forest was planted. One morning a few years before I’d found on it burnt-down blue candles remaining from some ritual or tryst. On this night the two boys and a girl sitting under it, perhaps startled by us as well, departed down one of the darkened paths. The new forest, still hosting the spirit of an older one, hid us from each other again, wrapping us in a wind-stirred night. The forest was alive with the soft scrape of dry, fingerlike leaves. The oak tree hefted up its own nocturnal roads, limbs and branches extending into folds of living darkness.

Intruders, we might have been, but humans once knew the night, and some of us are drawn to part those living curtains and explore it. I had made a necklace to give the woods as a gift. Once or twice the ground beneath me seemed to yank it out of my hands, as though it became a gravitational divining rod for something compelling beneath the forest soil. The necklace lay in the path, seeming as startled as I was, and I picked it up again. When I felt it was time to hang it in the branches of a small tree, I became aware of the rushing of water pouring through the seep that runs down one of the hills.

Folded into another hillside is an old orchard at the edge of the Leslie Golf Course. On a recent full moon night, the bright eye shined through the high branches of trees so old and tall that the forest was darker than night beneath them, though fallen walnuts glimmered yellow-green. Just beyond two fences the trees (pear trees, according to a naturalist friend) are spaced apart from each other, each with its distinct shape and character: gnarled, scraggy, tough yet delicately-formed. Together in the night they form a field of doorways, a place where the multiverse seems near and one might visit alternate worlds. Nighttime opens seams that stitch the trees into a loose weave of passageways and synapses. Though nearby housing developments cast too much light for clear visibility, I imagine them holding up a network of stars in their branches.

During his three university residencies in Ann Arbor (1921-26), Robert Frost wrote the poem “Acquainted with the Night.” The title evokes a sentience that might lay hands upon the wanderer who moves as though on a deserted stage with scenery remaining from a play.

As a student I lived for ten months in a group house owned by a professor’s family on sabbatical. They had left their disgruntled cat with us. He felt abandoned, and we had reason to believe he was too often the butt of jokes among his people. He loved one of the young sons of the family and would often appear on a roof projection at the window of my room, which belonged to the boy, and demand to be let in. I also had the job of feeding him.

One summer night, before students dispersed for the year, a housemate and I took a walk in the neighborhood. The black cat slipped out to follow, or rather, to precede us.

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We passed a house with an elongated porch arcade on one side, edged with rectangular columns. The cat suddenly darted into its interior. He began to patter swiftly between the columns, appearing, disappearing, pulling out the stops on his cat magic and demonstrating to us how to walk at night. This is how it’s done, he said, become inseparable from light, from shadow, from architecture and place, merge with its dreaming. I felt I had not known him until then, nor had he ever been more elusive and memorable.

Forward many years: Paula Frank, my niece Kes Nagler, and I were on a night walk to Barton Nature Area and the dam. Insects sang among grasses and bristling trees and shrubs. We crossed the pedestrian bridge, with the view over the oxbow drenched in silvers and grays. The woods were black and the curve of wetland I had seen under many moon-phases bright and wavering with water. We moved onto the old canal path and passed a tree whose upper branches form a star thrusting up above smaller trees.

A friend calls it the Owl Tree. I’d once seen an owl flying near it, a gray comet, soundless. I call it the Star Tree, for the many times I have seen stars bejewel its branches. Once, in daylight, I found a secret: iron spikes thrust into its trunk, probably many years ago, now incorporated in its growth. Were they steps up to some long-ago treehouse?

The three of us had planned a trip to an observatory that night, but chose to walk here instead because the sky was overcast. But we saw glowworms on the ground, little earth-stars. Their light was whiter than the greenish-gold I recalled from other summers. It seemed almost a camouflage—a reflection of contemporary humans’ LED lighting. They were living diamonds jeweling the area beneath the bushes that crowded in on the path. We walked a labyrinth, an area more extensive and deep than I’d known before, moving between trees and bushes, among the baby fireflies and crickets, the place seeping into our blood. We agreed that one must get lost in order to find some things; let the place itself speak and lead us. Ahead I could see what looked like the ridge of woods at Barton Hills, but we did not reach the dam.

Soon we found we had looped back onto the known path. My niece read her GPS, and we headed in the “right” direction. We crossed the bridge and arrived at the dam area. A weight of silvery water lapped the edge of the path. In the open area across it, a powerful welter of it poured down the dam and the pool churned. The high wall of the building loomed ahead. There is a sense of fulfillment here. I remembered volleys of big fish leaping one moonlit night years ago, silver-grey, launching themselves out of and splashing in dark whorls.

An orange light-fixture on the dam building turns on, with a buzzing sound, then off, then on again periodically. It is a haunting night-rhythm, an inarticulate warning.

We climbed the stairway onto the dam and walked the bridge of it. Halfway across, you can look out and sense the surge of the river and see white water muscling and pouring away into night, the Bird Hills forest rising beyond and its living presence piercing through the dark massing of trees.

We talked of the electricity of this place where industry and wildness converge. Paula mentioned that Alice Cooper had called Southeast Michigan “intense.” We felt an old, old magic. I think of salt seeps in the ground, extending into the middle of the peninsula, emanating from great deposits of halite under Wayne and Monroe Counties: remnants of ancient seas.

December in Gallup Park. Full moon, river-pools, white-shining rocks, trees and silver pathways. Around the moon is a large, clear area, bounded by a strange, full-circle cloud formation, like a wheel-rim. From the wheel, wisps of horsetail clouds radiate outward.

Walking on bridges, the moon is visible in the water abutting the pilings. Tiny particles from plants, floating on the obsidian water, move over the reflected glow, highlighting the steady motion of the water, slowed by a dam. It looks like flowing black glass. Near bridge supports, the water wrinkles into small whirlpools over the reflected moon.

After walking a place at night it becomes part of you under the skin. I dreamed once of a boat on a river or canal. By day it seemed decrepit. But in the night, bathed in silver-blue light, it darted with grace and swiftness on the waters.

We humans enumerate the turns of our planet, separating days and nights mentally from the one being with two faces that they are: one earth, one sun, and one expansive field.

Our pre-agricultural ancestors were more intimately acquainted with the night than we are. They lived in rhythms more fluid than clock-time. Painting, dance, theater, and poetry by firelight in caverns brought to life the dreaming and neurological connections between dimensions and levels of consciousness. Evidence also suggests that far more recently most humans spent time active and awake in the night between “first and second sleep.”

In ancient Greek, medieval, and Renaissance literature, including Shakespeare, night is associated with death. Hypnos (Sleep), and Thanatos (Death) are Night’s twin children, conduits to other worlds.

In the countryside in northern Europe, meandering paths used to be oriented to starlight for dark of moon wayfarers, but in the modern city the dark is diluted. Singing insects of late summer and autumn are awakened to perpetual courtship by artificial moonlight.

Even some plants are affected by perpetual light. Under natural conditions, their leaves droop at night; in cities, they remain erect.

Summer nights flower with lights as if the air breathed them out. Meteors run down curves of space like drops of bright, unexpected rain trailing on glass. Fireflies flame up from a field. It can be difficult to tell if you are seeing a long-tailed star or a male firefly signal.

The fireflies are threatened, like migrant birds and sleepless humans, by city lights that paint galactic rivers of their own on the earth as seen from space, and overwhelm night’s own wells of illumination. A dark sky movement is growing, with areas dedicated to eliminating light pollution and enabling direct connection with the star-salted skies. Michigan has three of them, including the oldest in the nation in Lenawee County. There are still places from which to greet these old night friends.

I have watched fireflies as they glittered over the peony garden in the Arb, while above them, a score of bats flickered. At the edge of the garden, tree peonies with rich presence and scent are opened into a blend of moonlight with the pale smear of city glow.

Next to the garden is a cemetery. On a recent night, two friends and I pushed open the vine-clad gate between the worlds and entered a well of moonlight and shadow. The moon rode above, shining among oak branches. The cemetery was wondrously dim and quiet, and the moonlight spilled in, creating its own roads. The light seemed tangible as glowing paint or water, highlighting its chosen stones: silvery and melting, or gray fading to black. The meander of roads did not admit to clock time which collected in its own pool outside the fence but could not touch us. People have set tiny solar lights into the ground here and there, quiet constellations. We walked on the gentle dark face of the world.

In another cemetery I saw the moon whiten an angel statue on a hill that seemed imbued with magnetic stone. The hill drew on the iron in our blood, slowing our steps when we climbed it on foot, resisting the linearity of the street that ascended it.

For many years there has been a special opportunity for people to walk in a group at night. On New Years Eve, Heather O’Neal and Pem Dorjee Sherpa lead a series of “New Year’s Eve Gourmet Dinner Treks,” all conducted after dark.

I participated for the second time in 2015. The year before we had traversed the nighttime woods, stopping for various stages of a dinner at points in Bird Hills and Argo, ending up at the Cascades. The hike was well-attended and fun. We walked through Sunset Brooks and part of Bird Hills, proceeded to Barton Dam where we ate snacks, and then climbed up on top of it to see the white water pouring down and churning among sheets of shining ice.

On private walks my friends and I use flashlights minimally. On the group hikes, there were many cell phones, the myriad white lights imbued with energy and curiosity, projections of mentalities dancing on the ground and bouncing off trees. Fey in their own manner.

The house of the Voyageurs Club glowed warmly in its windows. We moved along the ice-shining river, had dinner at Argo, then trekked through the Cascades. They were fantastic, with wind brushing through gold grasses and the water foaming white. It was colder here, but I breathed in the freshness.

Near Broadway Bridge walked a lone man, yipping and laughing like Coyote himself, at the meeting of three roads—named trivia by ancient Romans. A place for trading stories and information, sacred to the Greek Hekate and transferred to a version of the Roman Diana. Such places of popular exchange were later denigrated as “trivial.” Coyote knows better.

Today, a year later, our hike followed the trail of the buried Allen Creek. The stream was sequestered underground in 1926 (a common practice in cities then) and forgotten by most for many years. It rushes through another, perpetual night enclosed in cement pipes. On low-lying areas it will send extensions of itself bursting up in fountains through manholes during some storms. According to Heather O’Neal, you can hear the rushing sound of one of its drainage tributaries under a manhole on Eighth Street near Waterworks Park. Children in the 1920s swam in it, jumping into the water from a rope swing. And it may have inspired another Robert Frost poem.

I first heard of the stream in the 1990s from Bob Grese, professor emeritus in the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, who told me and a friend about it, calling it “his watershed.” Around that time I also met people who were among the first to consider asking the city to open up parts of it again. A resolution has since been passed to create along its path a greenway trail named Treeline that would connect with the Border-to-Border trail of Washtenaw County, and the Iron Belle trail of Michigan.

O’Neal is involved with the Treeline proposal. Her group met that evening at Himalayan Bazaar. We walked first to the Michigan Stadium. We huddled in the shadow behind its bulk, near which the stream begins, discussing our route. The stadium is built on a swampy area with such a high water table that pumps are used to drain water into the underground creek to avoid flooding the Big House. When the stadium was being constructed, natural springs were uncovered, and the site was so flooded that it was dubbed “Tillotson’s Pond” after Harry Tillotson, the business manager of the Athletic Department in the year 1926, when excavation for the stadium began.

We proceeded along the buried streambed, following railway tracks: a corridor, one of many through the city, rich in secret passageways that hide in plain sight. The tracks are lined with abandoned industries: more art space and housing may be available than we sometimes imagine.

At West Park, where we stopped for dinner and delicious Nepalese tea, sitting beneath big dark trees with a palpable beauty and presence, I felt a melancholy that seems to underlie this part of the town. Does the land miss another time, another people?

As we arrived at Argo, and Heather O’Neal pointed out where Allen Creek spills out gray and white and extremely forceful through a big pipe into the river at the bottom of the dam, we were exhilarated by the white, churning water and the silver-gleaming mirror further upstream that always reveals itself as vastly beautiful at night. I had been feeling the depression of having the stream underground all those many years, treated as an obstacle, then forgotten. I remembered many women who arrived one night at a dance I used to DJ at the former People Dancing Studio. They were dancing up their own storm on the floor, the stream under our feet seeming to well around them. There was an odd restlessness in the atmosphere. That same night, the Huron River took two lives.

There are fields of living interconnection through water, a flow we are meant to be part and aware of. In a water-rich area, there can be a sense of drag that when resisted results in depression. I find the cure is often to go to the water—the lake, the river, the wetland, even a rain puddle.

Night and water can bring worlds together, mend disruptions and rifts. Maybe ice is melting in glaciers, and seas are rising, in part to restore an interrupted flow.

Heather O’Neal sent me “A Brook in the City” by Robert Frost. It was published in 1923, possibly during one of the school years when he was in residence here. It may refer to the plans underway, sparked in 1923 by petitions from residents, to have Allen Creek buried, though it also probably references a similar situation in a New England city. An excerpt from it includes these phrases and lines:

How else dispose of an immortal force

No longer needed?...The brook was thrown

Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone

In fetid darkness still to live and run --

And all for nothing it had ever done

Except forget to go in fear perhaps.

No one would know except for ancient maps

That such a brook ran water. But I wonder

If from its being kept forever under,

The thoughts may not have risen that so keep

This new-built city from both work and sleep.

For women there is another opportunity for group night-walking. I only participated twice, many years ago, in Take Back the Night. The event may have had one of its multiple origins in Belgium, during the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, with a spontaneous candlelit walk through moonlit streets. In 1978, women survivors of sexual violence staged another in San Francisco, and from there it grew into a movement and an annual event worldwide.

The surge through the streets was a joyous flood; the sense of momentum toward an unprecedented state of freedom. It was one of the few times that I have felt the presence of a goddess, a specifically female deity. But I have walked in night woods with at least one man who was more uneasy there than I was. And I’ve long ago become aware that boys and men also are threatened, raped, and subject to predation in the night.

Hidden streams run through us. Night connects them, eluding artificial grids. It can take some courage to embrace them, especially alone, but the nocturnal gift can be a warm intimacy with life, with other people, with oneself, and the ineffable. We can support each other while exploring fertile dreaming that births new days.

The cat becomes shadow and light, merges with what he explores in intimate respect. We’re visitors and it’s best to approach night fields and forests with humble regard, ask permission to touch and gain entry.

Mid-July. Another walk with my niece, Kes, in Furstenberg Park. It’s still firefly time. Distant voices call to an errant companion. We laugh, imagine encountering her and asking, “Are...you...Sheila?” in sinister tones. The little embers flare gold and green. Then we find what may be a deer path into a deeper thicket where a small dark pond is loud with the evening conversation of bullfrogs. And in those less penetrable woods, the nature of the fireflies’ flashes changes. Another species, maybe, that we see in some locations: they spark. Their flashes are quick, emanating sharp bursts, little firecrackers, you can almost hear them snapping. They are everywhere. Momentary flares held in the embrace of one eternal moment that is their mother-matrix and ours, erasing what little may be left of the grid we walk on in patterned streets during the day. They immerse us in the present, the pool of night, the enchantment of the world.

Irena Nagler writes fiction and poetry, teaches environmental movement meditation, and is a visual and performing artist. Contact her by email at birena@umich.edu. Information on creating and preserving dark skies and minimizing light pollution can be found at sites.lsa.umich.edu/darkskiesmidarskypark.org (a website on Headlands International Dark Sky Park in the northern Lower Peninsula) and many other sites.

Anyone interested in a group night-hike with Heather O’Neal is welcome to email her at ofglobal@aol.com.