On the Edge of the Light

I stood looking down the road, the flashing red and white lights dancing across the trees and sparkling off the broken glass strewn across the pavement.  The lights shone off the engine and the back of the tow truck creating a small pocket of luminescence in the black night of a new moon.  The cool breeze of the nighttime hours played across the back of my neck questioningly, as if to ask, ‘what brings you out here at this hour?’  A glance at the aerodynamically challenged car was my only answer. 

It was beyond the time where I was useful in my capacity as a firefighter.  We were there “in case,” of which on this night there had been no fire, but I was ready as were my compatriots.  Once the critical “in case” moments pass, most of us fulfilled the role of spectator.

Yet I found myself drawn to the edge of the artificially illuminated pocket created by the colorful explosion of tragedy.  With my back to the lights, I walked with almost measured steps and looked out over the road that, though clear and visible under my feet, vanished into darkness just yards away.

I stared for a long time out into the night.  I knew that if I walked to the other side of this imagined dome, this silent cacophony of light, I would witness the same effect.  I tried to picture myself from above.  Not just myself, but the entire scene; a patch of unnatural light in the surrounding darkness. 

I recognized that I was standing in a place reserved for tires, not boots.  And that is an intriguing feeling – more so on an interstate: to walk where people don’t usually walk.  For me it was a moment of both pride and humility.  I also realized that at that moment of the night, I had no idea what lay down that road. 

The lights, though bright, placed an artificial sheen on the surrounding foliage.  Nothing looked exactly as it should.  Colors were off, shadows stretched, and I felt at that moment, on the precipice of the surrounding night, as if I was beholding the truth of a great mystery.  It was a vastness that would have been overwhelming to my full attention, which I could not offer.  It was as if the lights provided us access to something we cannot normally see, and like the lights and our task, we were only allowed a temporary audience in the presence of the unknown.

In the time I served as a firefighter, after that particular night, when and if the opportunity affords, I would walk to the edge of the luminescence.  I would find myself staring intently at that which some might take for granted.  I wonder what it is that tugged at me.  What spoke in the gentle cool of the night air?  Perhaps it was simply life.  Perhaps it was an apocalyptic note that things are changing in our world on every level, but we don’t wish to notice.  Perhaps it was a glimpse of God, seen only when we cannot see what we think is present before us.  Perhaps, whatever it was, was beyond the full linguistic range of this declining age.  It did not seem to be menacing, though.  It just seemed to be a feeling grasped like smoke.  Déjà vu of the most wonderfully frustrating.  There and gone, much like the evidence of that car wreck in the span of a week.

There are times when I believe that my grandfather might have been able to offer insight or counsel on that sense of otherness to the world visibly invisible on the edge of the light.  That might be due to the fact that with age comes the understanding of the wonderment of childhood.  It is in that middle time that things make less sense, partially due to the fact that we work so hard to make everything structurally sound and channel our brains into compact cubicles that provide no sense of imagination.  With age comes the revelation of the fact that there need not be any real barriers.  In childhood there are no barriers.  Perhaps that is why grandparents and grandchildren connect so easily and the parents in the middle are unable to quantify the relationship because it can’t be qualified except through love.  In the middle is where people are trying so desperately to carve out life that they often find themselves unable to live.

Sometimes I thought that I could almost hear my grandfather explain what it was I felt when I look down the familiar made strange.  Then, though, just as I feel I could have articulated it, I find that my words are no longer the correct ones and the explanation fades as a dream in the morning light.  Perhaps it is in that fading that the answer exists, or perhaps the fading is the answer. 

But to stare into that night was almost as if I stood on the edge of one existence and find myself looking into the consciousness of another existence - one that I cannot fully grasp due to the fact of my role as firefighter.  I might very well have to cease being one to pursue the other.  Perhaps that is what kept me peering intently but not venturing further. 

There are times, though, that I desperately wanted to walk just a few more steps into the realm beyond the illuminated bubble and into the whispering night that speaks gently of the fact that life is sublimely simple but still so vast as to move beyond comprehension.