It's fall. It doesn't feel like fall very much when it's 75 degrees around here, but I guess it's still fall. Last week we got that blessed extra hour of sleep, turning the clocks back an hour to de-activate the dreaded Daylight Savings Time. And suddenly it was fall, or something like it, with the nighttime coming in at 6 o'clock for the evening commute back home.
My frequent passenger doesn't like the long drive in the now-black evening. "It's scary," he says quietly from the backseat. We head far into the suburbs, where there are still long patches of no-retail, no-gas highway, the sky dark enough to see stars. The bright lights of major intersections and the red taillights smear together in a blur; I am tired.
The dark fall night makes me think of college in New York, or maybe driving on Fridays to clubs in Pennsylvania when I was younger and wilder. Those were even blacker skies with less civilization intruding on the country road, an hour of drive before you saw anything to speak of besides the shiny-eyed deer in the near woods. I wish now there was cold to go along with the dark.
Soon we are going through the Tunnel of Trees, the most sinister part of the dark road home. At any moment there might be something to jump out from the tight bushes lining the 2-lane path cut through this farm. I finally have an occasion to legitimately use the high-intensity sodium beam-lights mounted to the front of my safari vehicle: I press the button but nothing happens---a blown fuse, maybe? And then I am leaving the Tunnel of Trees, and there's no need for the extra illumination any more.
Left turn, right turn, left again and HOME.