#586 Bring on the Night! (medium Skinny horizontal) (6 x 18 trim)

$16.00

Image size 4.7.5 x 16.75″; trim size 6 x 18″ signed and hand-titled by Ed.

The view of Seattle at night can transfix a person who sees it for the first time coming across on one of the ferries, especially on a cold and windy night in the winter, when the city seems to beckon warmth and welcome.  The first time I saw it, I imagined reaching land and being welcomed by a lively street scene with outdoor cafes and people strumming ukeleles. Imagine my chagrin when we reached the Colman Dock to find gritty old Seattle awaiting us. But it’s still a scene that is indelible and is worth celebrating.

Nighttime lights have a serious downside: they kill migratory birds and give us cancer, Nature and God (or the Goddess, or they, I’m not taking any sides here) intended the night to be dark and that’s what is healthy for us. But all things in moderation. It would be absurd to ask humans– a species that is essentially worthless on a moonless night–not to partake in the clever technologies that have been invented to defeat our adversaries and our fears. And I mean fears. We often stay in my parents-in-law’s house in the Bootheel of New Mexico, our nearest neighbor is 3 miles away. I had been lulled into a false notion at one point that fear of the dark was something you had as a child but then outgrew. At one point I said, “I’m going to go retrieve (something) that I left out in the car on the driveway and I burst toward the door. When I opened it I encountered the dead of a moonless night and was frozen in terror, I did not proceed even a foot further. I realized at that point that I had come to think of the darkness of a Seattle night, full of ‘light pollution,’  as the real darkness of night. It’s not even close.