Night Trip

  "…INTO THE GLOOM BOTH WAYS…"

  I watched my step as I walked because the rain had sodden the soil and small bogs had materialized across the land. Some way ahead, when the angle between the moon and myself was right, the sun's light did a billiard shot off the rock in the sky, onto and off the waterlogged grass, and into my eyes, allowing me to see the watery obstacles ahead. I was wearing training shoes that weren't waterproof, so I did my best to avoid these swampy areas, sometimes detouring widely to avoid vast lakes thirty metres across. But when the lakes and puddles and bogs and swamps, or whatever you want to call them, rolled close to me, the moonlight no longer reflected into my eyes off the silvery surfaces and I found it hard to see where I was stepping, even though the ground was a mere six feet away from my eyes. Everything that didn't glitter in the moonlight was as black as if a layer of obsidian fog coated the land. I half expected the Hound of the Baskervilles to unleash a cry into the night.

  Walking with my head down, I almost literally strolled right into a fence. I stopped and stared at the way ahead. Beyond this fence of pale weatherworn wood was a black clump of night that slowly revealed itself to be trees. I realized I had come to the end of the open land, but what lay ahead? A sheer drop at the edge of the world? Or maybe I'd stumbled onto Tolkien's Mirkwood, and inside I'd find Elves and Hobbits.

  I took a step closer to the fence. It was chest-high, post and 3-rail format. I looked left and right, seeking a gate or other kind of passage, but the fence zipped away into the gloom both ways. For all I knew, it could encircle the Earth like one of Saturn's rings around that gaseous planet, cutting across seas, diving countries, punching holes through mountains, or scaling them. I softly kicked the bottom rail and wondered if the vibration that travelled through the wood would be felt by some kid on that fence in Berlin; if birds would take flight from the barrier in Peru. I briefly wondered if I should wait here and see if, in half a day's time, the vibration would return to me after a full lap of the Earth.

  "Stop being silly," I told myself, and climbed the fence.