Night In The World: “Chapter 3”
Night In The World
BY SHARON ENGLISH
Night In The World
• THE LAKE •
3
In The Photograph, Hilted Arches perches on a leaf. It’s black and brown and deep dark green, with markings like pale lichen — as if a little spot of soil had grown wings. Gabe doesn’t actually need the image; she knows Hilted Arches. When she closes her eyes, she can picture the white reniform spots and the fine and curious pattern of dark “arches” along its fringe.
Melanchra. Melanchra…adjunct? Adjuncta.
Her eyes flutter open. Turn the picture over: correct! Check the box on the list. Check the time: past eleven?
She rubs her face and sits up straight. Just one more stack after this, then bed. Really.
Next!
This moth shimmers like moss lit from within. The Hologram, one of her favourites. Diachrysia balluca. Another check. And that makes two hundred.
When she picks up the next stack she reverses them, so she sees only the scientific names written on the back.
Parallelia bistriaris. The Male Looper. A veined leaf. Quick look to confirm, check.
Tegeticula yuccasella. Yucca. An ermine robe.
Cucullia asteroides. The Asteroid, another fave. Body of a broken twig.
Cosmopterix pulchrimella. Chambers’s Cosmopterix. Four wind-whipped, white streaks. Crazy looking thing.
Chytonix palliatricula.
This the time of crisis. Rupture. Grief.
Gabe recognizes the name. She knows that she knows this moth. But no image comes to mind. The name doesn’t mean anything to her, that’s the problem. Who the hell knows Latin? There’s noth- ing in the words to connect to, so it’s like reading a serial number, a bar code.
With a sigh Gabe flips the card. The Cloaked Marvel —of course!
It’s late, she should get some rest, but the names, the freakin’ names, she’s got to get them straight. She swivels to look at the wall behind her. Pictures of moths cover it entirely, rising from the quarter-round just above the carpet and fanning into branches: hundreds of index-card-sized photos of small creatures perching on leaves, twigs, bark. In black felt pen the common name appears on the border of each, the binomial name on the reverse. Gabe’s gaze sweeps along the thick Noctuidae branch to which Chytonix palliatricula belongs. Though she can’t remember the tribal name either. Tribe Xylenini? Orthosiini?
They find no purchase in her mind, these scientific names. Only by this rote repetition has she been able to press them into memory, bit by bit. And even then, it’s like pressing pieces of paper to skin, sticky notes.
Now her whole life depends on that paper.
In the morning, Gabe scrapes ice off her car, letting it idle to warm. Temperatures will rise to eleven degrees in Whitehorse, Yukon, today, while here in Peterborough, Ontario, it’s sunk to near minus-thirty. Gabe grunts as she reaches across the wind- shield, straining against tight yet indispensable layers of clothes, 38 pausing to wipe her nose. The cold engine chutters and chugs. The sun looks like a stained penny lost behind the clouds, and offers no heat.
Downtown, a group of people without the luxury of being deterred by deep cold, mostly young men, has gathered on the steps of the shelter like on any other day. The dealers have struck up stiffened poses in their usual doorways. At a red light, while exhaust billows from the dripping tailpipe of the pickup ahead, Gabe watches a man without gloves talk on a phone. His dry grey hands make her wince.
Twenty minutes south of the city, she pulls up to the park entrance. A chain has been strung permanently across it, hers the only vehicle. Some years ago the Serpent Mounds Park closed for winter and never reopened. The Band cited failing infrastructure and lack of public support. The guard booth is rotting, the electronic parking arm broken and the road impassable from storm damage.
After a couple last swigs from the thermos, Gabe cuts the engine. Wind whistles and moans around the car. She pushes the door open.
With snowshoes clasped to her boots, she hikes into the former campground, following a buried vehicle pathway through the woods. Posts used to mark the defunct site grid, but some- one has removed them, perhaps for firewood. When she arrived last November the ground was littered with beer bottles and other refuse, and she brought along bags for cleanup whenever she visited. Now the place looks magical: a great white blanket danced over by rabbit feet, deer hooves, bird claws and coyote paws, and her. She warms up quickly by lifting her feet, her breath like steam, the nip of the air on her cheeks a spirited lover, teasing. It’s so joyful to be here that she stops, grinning—seized by the sheer magic of this place, this day, her body’s vigour and the fortune that’s hers to be alive and here right now. From a cedar to her right two large dark wings lift: an osprey, heading into deeper cover.
The same hike almost every day since she returned to Ontario. Rice Lake has always acted like a magnet on her, like she’s in orbit around it.
She emerges from the trees near the Mound, raised to over- look the lake. In the snow it looks like any other hill. Gabe climbs to the top, reaches into her pocket for the container of birdseed, opens it and scatters the contents with murmured thanks. Then the other pocket, the bag of cornmeal. Her gesture made, she turns and sweeps her gaze across the expanse below.
The lake is frozen and snow-covered, its southern shore lost in a motionless white haze. In the middle distance the wooded islands look stony, like archaic temples or hoary dreams of the slumbering land.
The Serpent and other mounds in the park were raised by the Mississaugii centuries ago. They chose this place for their dead to rest: not in a heaven above, but a heavenly embrace right here. This place has been beloved for millennia; perhaps that’s why she, whose Irish-Black-Acadian ancestry is a trail of forgotten crumbs, feels more at home here. It’s easy to slip out of time and current worries on these visits too: to imagine the lake as young and fresh, the Mound builders just over the rise preserving fish, tending fires. Or to scry in the mists and oak leaves’ dry rattle a future when all today’s turmoil has been resolved, and healing and peace brought to this beleaguered world.
But now is not that time.
This is the time of crisis. Rupture. Grief. This maelstrom has been building for a while, and though she’s fumed and ranted about the forest fires, plastics, acid rain, chemical pollutants, radiation, destabilized weather, and loss of so many species forever, and though the downward human spiral has made her vision blur and bones ache with sadness and rage, she’s dithered away her time. And now—hello—she’s thirty-five. It’s time to get serious—do something that matters, for fuck’s sake, in a corner where she might make a difference.
She was never a strong student. Finishing her undergrad became a running family joke —What’s the major now, Gabe? She can still hear Jenn’s groan when Gabe told her the news: that she was moving back from Halifax to enroll in grad school.
“For moths?”
Yes, dear sister, moths.
“Have you even paid off your student loans?”
Yes she paid, every goddamn dollar, and that’s left her with squat, after working full-time for years. Jenn came around; she always did. And in November Gabe left the apartment that was two blocks from the ocean, and her job at Parks Canada, and all the great friends she’d made out east. Traded that life in for “coming home,” as Jenn called it: to the city Gabe gladly fled after high school, and the house she’d grown up in, now renovated by Jenn and her family, and a bedroom in the basement vacated by one of her sons.
A wind comes off the lake, dusting Gabe with snow. Her feet and fingers are going numb; she’s been still too long. Her thesis supervisor expects her later this morning, to discuss Gabe’s project proposal —a Dr. Hegyi, whom she has yet to meet in person. Gabe claps and stomps to get her blood flowing, then with a last loving look at the lake, heads down to retrace her tracks.
This is not the year to linger, to meander dreamily as she’s always loved to. She’s got to take off these snowshoes and hit the concrete.
The car, the highway, the wider highway. Fields replaced by industrial parks, malls, new housing developments jammed right up to the road, and then, an invisible threshold where the city takes over and she’s inside Toronto, all grandly entangled schemes gathered around the traffic grid.
The campus, the parking lot, the laneway to the Earth Sciences building, more coffee? Bad idea. She’s nervous enough. The stair- case, the grey hallway lit by fluorescents, the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, office doors all looking alike.
“Dr. Hegyi?” This door stands ajar and Gabe raps.
“Yes!” An arm waves her in. “Just a moment!”
Gabe sits in a chair near the door while Dr. Hegyi types. Cycling helmet on the desk, a carrier bag next to it. Snow flurrying outside. Seriously?
“I’m thrilled to meet you, Gabrielle,” Dr. Hegyi says, pushing back from the screen still looking at it, then turning to her, stand- ing but not getting much taller, and reaching out a hand. Tamara Hegyi, honey bee specialist and director of the university’s Bee Evolution, Ecology and Protection (BEEp) Lab, has the plump cheeks of a child, a girl’s sweet smile, short greying hair, and rim- less glasses around bright eyes. Gabe guesses that she’s not much older than herself.
“I go by Gabe,” she says.
“Gabe it is. Now I was just responding to Professor Brimer, I made him aware of you and he’ll be joining the committee. Which is one down, one more to go, but Brimer was the crucial one, the one we needed the most. Not that the other member won’t matter! Of course they will. Now he mentioned several studies he thinks you should include in your literature review. I asked him to for- ward them and oh —I didn’t copy you on the email. Well I’ll send them on. Now I’ve read the draft project proposal you sent, and it’s just fine.”
Dr. Hegyi pauses to smile at her again.
“That’s a relief.”
“Yes, no worries, Gabrielle — Gabe, you’re on the right track. And I didn’t get a chance yet, but I’m going to send it back with comments. You’ve a clear idea what you want to do, that’s good, so to get ready for the committee we’ll just flesh things out a bit more on why and how. Are you looking at disturbances, spatial or temporal dynamics, that kind of thing.”
“I didn’t realize those aspects would come into the work at this stage,” Gabe says carefully, wondering if she even understands what “spatial dynamics” means. She’s proposed a straightforward species count in two distinct bioregions where little is known about the state of moth populations. The same could be said for the rest of the country, in fact.
“Oh, it’s not too soon to be thinking about them,” says Hegyi, who hasn’t told Gabe what to call her yet. “It will add value and complexity.” Gabe nods. “Now the catches, I wasn’t clear what you were planning to do. Are you going to collect the moths for study?”
“Trap, count and release,” Gabe says. “That I’m pretty used to from all the Moth Nights in the park, though we didn’t count them. Plus I’ve been doing it on my own for ages.”
Hegyi smiles. “Fantastic. I’m so happy that the park you worked at offered such a program. So you will not be collecting at all?”
The question is unexpected. She’s never “collected” moths, for the simple reason that when you collect them, they die. She’s never understood why anyone would want to do that.
“Uh, no, I didn’t see a need to,” she says. “Well, the committee may disagree.”
Gabe opens her mouth, closes it. Still tripping over her surprise. “Can we work around that, then?”
“Maybe. If you present good reasons. I mean, persuade them.”
“Moth populations are in decline, species are dying out . . .” And it’s just, like, wrong?
“That’s a start, yes.”
“So, correct me here, but I didn’t think collecting was going to be necessary. I’ve been reading studies, and some do kill moths, but not all.”
“The kinds of studies you’re hoping to conduct do collect,” Hegyi says. Her sweetness has gone; was saying “kill” too blunt? “How can one be accurate otherwise? See,” she continues, “that is the challenge in our field. Obtaining accurate data, assuring that what you contribute has integrity, can stand up to scrutiny, because you are building important knowledge.”
“Of course.”
“So, we will work on this together!” Her smile returns, eyes shining with enthusiasm.
The meeting ends shortly after, and Gabe wanders down the hallway but cannot find the stairwell door; she must have gone the wrong direction. There’s an exit sign up ahead, so she takes that and emerges into a crowded common area. Gabe watches hundreds of students funnel slowly through two open doors. A light has been activated above them, signaling that the lecture is about to begin. As the doors swing closed Gabe glimpses students settling into padded theater-style chairs, opening laptops and notebooks, chatting to friends, texting. Then the sound from within the room muffles.
The light traps she uses for moths lure them down into a bin that is lined with paper eggshell cartons, snug places for moths to stay until released. In the traps used by collectors, moths fly in just the same but land in a jar of alcohol solution. From the outside the traps look identical; the moths trust the light, either way.
LITERATURE OF RESTORATION AND "CHAPTER 3"
My fiction has always focused on place and people. In my novel Night in the World, I wanted to explore the questions of home and personal purpose in a time of ecological crisis. We face this extreme situation because of our profound sense of separation from, and conviction of entitlement over, the living world. For this story, I wanted to shift all the non-human elements from their usual position as the backdrops of human drama, into the fore. To have the living world be a felt presence and agency.
Yet I also believed it was crucial to locate the story in a familiar urban setting—not ‘over there’ in time or space—then slowly notch up the volume and bring in the wild. The story follows three characters, each perspective offering a raw and unique view of the challenges we face and the healing and growth that’s possible when we meet them. I hoped to have the reader reconsider their own home and purpose in an enlarged and beautiful way, to reflect on the legacies we’ve inherited and consider a future of intimate relations with all of our kin, in which we truly come home.
The three characters’ perspectives are called, alternately, The River, The Island, The Lake. In this chapter we meet the character Gabe for the first time. In her mid-thirties, and after years of living on the east coast, she’s moved back to her hometown of Peterborough, Ontario and enrolled in a Masters in Ecology degree. She’s hoping to up her game: to gain the skills and credentials to study and protect moths, a lifelong passion.
SHARON ENGLISH
/ Author
Watch Sharon English Read "Chapter 3"
BIO
Sharon English is the author of the novel Night in the World (Freehand Books, 2022) and two short story collections, Uncomfortably Numb and Zero Gravity (Porcupine’s Quill 2002 and 2006). In 2020 she co-edited “Writing in the Age of Unravelling,” a special issue of CNQ magazine devoted to ecologically themed literature. Her essays and reflections about our relationship to the natural world have appeared in CNQ, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, and on the Dark Mountain Project’s website. Currently she’s writing an online essay series called “Night in This World,” about forming a relationship to her new home territory. Originally from London, ON, Sharon lived for decades in Toronto and now resides in rural Nova Scotia.