Spreading the Dark

I blow out street lights.

I don't mean to. It's not like I carry a slingshot or air-rifle and take potshots to amuse myself while waiting for a bus. I just walk along and watch the lights go out — sometimes accompanied by a quiet little "fizzle-pop."

Nor does it happen all the time, otherwise Toronto Hydro would surely have caught up to me and I'd be doing five to ten for interfering with public works. The truth is, I can go for weeks, sometimes even months, without witnessing a single streetlight "shuffle of its mortal coil" (a phrase particularly apt for incandescent lights).On the other hand, it's not unusual for me to inadvertently assassinate as many as three lights in the course of a half hour walk.

The first time was in my teens. It was in the late fall or early winter of 1969 and I was coming home from my girlfriend's place. I lived in Malton at the time and was walking down Morningside Drive when suddenly there was a little popping sound. I looked up just in time to see a fading glow in the lamp directly above. Although I didn't attach any importance to the incident, it stuck in my mind because it had never happened before.

Ah, but that was then.

The next light was roughly a year later, once again directly above my head. Having a vague sort of interest in science and statistics, I set about determining the odds. Several hours spent with a slide-rule (no hand calculators back then) brought me to the conclusion that I'd be wise to pursue a career that did not involve science or statistics.

Over the next few years the phenomenon continued intermittently. It was still happening when I moved out of Malton shortly after a gas line exploded outside my home and blew up the central shopping district (an incident I still say I had no part in), but around 1978 it stopped. For ten years the only lights that blew were the run-of-the-mill household lights and I pretty well forgot about the matter. Then, in 1988 it started again with a vengeance. By 1989 I had racked up an even half-dozen street lamps and decided it was time to start establishing some rules to this game.

Rule number one: I can only count lights which blow out either directly above me or one lamp post away.

Rule number two: I have to be able to see the dying glow.

Rule number three: lights which show a tendency to go out repeatedly, or have some obvious physical cause for expiring (such as a gas main explosion) don't count.

Over the past ten years I can confidently state that, like some sort of cockeyed Dr. Kevorkian, I have been present for the deaths of over 57 street lamps.

When I was younger I looked for an emotional pattern, Did it happen when I was angry? Happy? Sexually frustrated? Sexually satisfied? As I got older I looked for more mundane explanations. Maybe it happened to everyone but they just took it in stride, although nobody I asked could recall having been under a street lamp when it blew out. (Nor was it simply that they didn't notice, since they would invariably comment if they were with me when it happened. "Hey, look at that. The light just went out," they'd say. "Huh, imagine that," I'd answer and change the subject.)

So it isn't psychic, but neither is it a shared urban experience. What's left?

Damned if I know.

There's certainly nothing I can do with it. Putting out street lamps seems completely devoid of any positive benefits — except maybe to drug dealers and other criminal types.

Furthermore, my own special ability comes with subtle, psychological drawbacks.

The first, and most obvious of course, is the fact that I get blamed for every light that blows anywhere near me. I am of the opinion that only streetlights are in danger from my destructive emanations and any other form of illumination is perfectly safe. This distinction, however, is often overlooked by those who know me. If I visit a friend's house in which the bathroom light dies three days later, it's a safe bet I will get the blame. But while I feel this is distinctly unfair, it causes me no undue distress.

Well, not quite true. A light blowing out when I'm depressed, for instance, acts as a confirmation of my internal darkness; whereas when I'm feeling happy it just reminds me that "this too shall pass."

My main worry, however, is what will happen when I die. Like most people, I draw much of my spiritual guidance from popular movies. I know that to ensure a happy afterlife we're supposed to "go to the light."

But what if, just I get close, I blow it out?

So Why Is Mother Nature Such a Wimp?

In Genesis 2:5 it talks about the time before all the plants had grown. And why hadn't they grown? Because "the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground." That always puzzled me. Not the rain part, but the "man to till the ground" part. Did this mean that plants couldn't grow without our help? Nonsense, I thought.

And then my wife started this garden in our backyard and I learned different. The truth, it would seem,is that after millions of years of practice, nature is still really lousy at growing without our help.

We have these seeds, you see. I forget which particular plant they're supposed to turn into, but before they can be planted they have to be "germinated." And how do you germinate seeds? It turns out you plant the little suckers inside your house. We have these special planting things, they look like egg cartons made from really emphatic recycled material, the kind that looks like it's recycling right before your eyes which is pretty much what it's doing. The idea is to fill each compartment with dirt (preferably designer dirt, of course) and carefully plant the seeds.Once they start to grow we take them outside and plant the entire biodegradableegg carton in the ground.

Is this really the way the wilderness grew? Ridiculous.

On the other hand, there was Johnny Appleseed.

Actually, his name was John Chapman, born 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts. His father was away from the family for long periods of time, first as a volunteer soldier in the Revolutionary War shortly after John's birth. During this time John's mother died and after the war Mr. Chapman remarried and began a new family.

In the 1790s, John, along with his half-brother Nathaniel, went west and by the 1800s Nathaniel was settling down to raise a family.

John, on the other hand, had become a convert to the Swedeborgian religion and a member of the General Convention of the New Jerusalem, the name by which it was incorporated in America. In fact, it was in an issue of the Society
for Printing, Publishing and Circulating the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, dated January 14, 1817, that we get one of our earliest reports on Johnny's activities:

There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. A man has appeared who seems to be almost independent of corporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere, in house or out of house, and live upon the coarsest and most scanty fare. He has actually thawed ice with his bare feet. He procures what books he can of the New Church, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers, and sometimes divides a book into two or three parts for more extensive distribution and usefulness. This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.

These become valuable as the settlements approximate, and the profits of the whole are intended
for the purpose of enabling him to print all the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and distribute them through the western settlements of the United States.

Although the story of Johnny Appleseed planting seeds all across the country is true, the image of him doing so freely and at his own expense is not entirely accurate. Johnny was essentially a nurseryman and while he apparently did give away seeds and seedlings, it was on condition of future payment. Still, the fact remains that he created thousands and thousands of apple orchards across the countryside.

So maybe the other thing is true too.

Maybe the wilderness does need us to keep it going.

For those interested, more information on Johnny Appleseed is available at these
sites:

Appleseed.org

Johnny
Appleseed's Biography from Pennsylvania State Department

Yahoo's
Johnny Appleseed Links