It’s 1:30 in the morning and I need to finish this column
tonight because there won’t be any other time before my deadline
tomorrow.
It’s 1:30 in the morning and I need to finish this column tonight because there won’t be any other time before my deadline tomorrow.
I was at work until almost midnight, and after I went through the McDonald’s drive through for my late night snack and drove home, it was close to 1:00am.
Wake-up is going to come awfully early because I have to be back at work at 8:30am tomorrow. I know I’m going to be sorry for staying up this late but the awful truth is, I’m having fun. I like night and the way things sound and look different in the dark.
As I was waiting in the drive-thru, I turned on the car radio to the Carmel classical station. I wanted to drown out the hip hop coming from the car ahead of me. But then I noticed that I was also drowning out the sound of the train whistle along the tracks several blocks away.
Hearing a train whistle isn’t as much fun as seeing an actual train, but it’s still pretty neat, and even neater at night. Night magnifies the mystery of where the train has come from and where it’s going, what it’s carrying, or who’s on it and the places it’ll pass through.
As I was thinking about the train, a guy on a bike rode into the drive-thru lane. He was wearing a headlamp and his bike had a flashing green taillight. A plastic shopping bag hung from one handlebar.
I probably would never even have noticed him during the day. He was neatly dressed and it was his lighting system that made me notice him. As it was, I was happy to have him remain another unexplained phenomenon of the night.
As somebody working the late shift, I’m always kind of comforted by the people working even later than me. I see the field workers picking baby lettuce, the road workers fixing a road at night so commuters aren’t delayed, the occasional cop or highway patrol car, and I think about the many others I don’t see: doctors and nurses, bakers, firefighters, workers in food processing plants.
They keep things running while most of us sleep, kind of like the train engineer pulling the rest of the train through the night.
Later in the summer, the night here in Hollister will include the sounds of the tomato cannery, humming and steaming as it runs ’round the clock, since ripe tomatoes won’t wait. And over the July 4th weekend the night will be punctuated by the sound of thousands of Harleys. Of course, the rally itself doesn’t run all night, but the dull roar somehow continues, broken repeatedly by the burst of a few bikes zooming off for a nocturnal adventure or perhaps just to enjoy the sound of the roaring engine.
And now it’s time for me to go upstairs and open the window so I can listen for little bird noises, bat sonar and some of the other softer sounds of the night.
