Anyone Here?

The days are short now; by 5:30, it’s effectively dark, and tonight there is an egg-shaped moon rising through the trees to the south-south-east (or something like that: I am direction-challenged). I went out for a longish walk this afternoon, a walk through what surely seemed a very strange landscape. It was darkening, but not yet dark, and it looked very much as if I had wandered into a setting for some Hollywood sci-fi movie, the vision of a town in which everyone had disappeared toward the end of an otherwise pleasant Sunday afternoon. House after house showed no signs of life, no lights of any kind. No cars were advancing or retreating down the roads. Driveways were empty. So inclined, I might have believed that The Rapture had happened, sadly—tragically—leaving me behind, and alone.

But, in fact, it is just Point Roberts as winter closes in on us. It wasn’t a very wintry day, today, but enough for Ed to get the winter lights up. These are not Christmas lights; they are not even decorative lights. They are lights attached to the trunk and branches of a mountain ash tree next to our porch. They turn on each night in order to communicate to anyone who might drive or walk down our street after 4:30 p.m. and until 11 p.m. that there is someone in Point Roberts, alive and well and wishing this/these other persons the best of an otherwise gray season.

After an hour of walking, I had seen one other human being (a man walked out of his door, picked up a big chunk of wood from his woodpile and returned to his fireside), as well as three cars in a row (a party I wasn’t invited to, I guess). There are only 1500 (circa) permanent residents here, but in the late fall, even that number drops as people drift southward. Of our ten quilters, one has gone to Mexico; another is heading soon to Florida, yet another is basking on the Hawaiian beaches for a bit. The folks who inhabit the marina have also headed to sunnier climates.

I don’t have much in the way of longings to be somewhere warmer, but I am always startled by the sense of desertion that arrives with November. And I wonder about the new people who have immigrated to P.R. over the past few years: what must they think when they see us in November? Or, more to the point, don’t see us in November. It is hard to convey the quiet, the stillness, the absence in such a walk. I mean, it’s not as if I were walking in some primal wilderness; I was on paved roads with many houses in view at all times. It’s a long way from living in Los Angeles, and I never feel it so much as during these November late afternoons.