A Summer Night

If I had really thought the noise through, I would have known that these were just harmless raccoons. During my childhood, and even adolescent years, I had a bedroom that faced West, away from the lake and towards the roof of the garage and the driveway. The garage was a disaster then, and is only marginally better now, which meant that many times the household garbage would make it to the garbage cans but the cans wouldn’t make it inside the garage. In summer, there was plenty of garbage generated by this family, and especially in summer it was the sort of garbage that makes raccoons rather excited- steak bones, half eaten hamburgers with their buns marinated in the old ketchup, and corn husks that still offered plenty of corn to be eaten.

These raccoons would fight over this food. But it was not as benign as that written word sounds. The fight was viscous, and if to the death, and it featured hissing and growling and purely evil, guttural grunts of envy and hatred. This was a real fight, and the cans would get knocked over and roll once or twice, while the varmints would scratch and tug and bite, all the while making this most unholy, terrifying sound. As a child, I would lie awake, my bedroom window open out of necessity as I desperately tried to force the cooler night air into my suffocated room. The window being open did little to invite the night air in, but the night sounds flooded my room, and found my ears no matter how tightly I pressed my pillow.

And then there was the night when I heard footsteps on the stairs. They weren’t steps taken gently and carefully in the night in the way that a normal person would descend or ascend a flight of narrow, dark stairs. They were rushed steps of a person running, a person in a hurry, a person in a serious, frantic frame of mind. Sometime in the still of the night, after the raccoons had finished fighting and eating and making such a famous fuss of the whole thing, I heard these steps. I woke to hear them, to hear the nervous rush of noise that came from the stairway and into my room. I put on my glasses so that I could hear more clearly. I heard those steps continue, towards what I thought was the back room of the house. It was just a room off of the dining room that was mostly a closet but had, at this point in my childhood, become an office after the introduction of one very expensive, mostly useless, Mac computer.

That computer, as I understood it then, cost approximately more than one adults annual salary. That computer, as I figured, was also the aim of whomever it was that made these sudden footsteps. I heard what I thought was a yell that came out as more of a loud grunt, followed by silence. Then followed by more footsteps. There was a struggle. Likely over the computer. But had my dad won? Had he successfully turned away the intruder? I lay in my hot bed, a mess of sweat and terror, wondering how it had all played out. I don’t remember falling asleep that night, but I must have. I would have left my glasses on to heighten my sense of awareness even as I slept a tortured, shallow sleep.

That following morning, when light mercifully came to my back window and pushed away the horrors of the night, I walked with my dad to the Keg Room. I can remember this because I don’t think I made that walk with him, down the shore path, past Gage Marine and over the soggy frontage that plagues those homes to the north of it, more than that one time in all of my life. I remember walking awkwardly, afraid to mention what I had heard the night before. So I paused, and I tried to fight the mention of it, but I gave in. I told him that someone had been in the house last night, that the computer had most likely been stolen, and that while I don’t know exactly what happened, something did. It felt good to confess what I had heard.

As it turned out, there was no intruder. There was only, instead, my father running down the dark stairs to the first floor bathroom. There was no struggle, no yelling. Just my father racing to the bathroom so that he could throw up. Perhaps the corn was bad, or the steak a day or four past its optimal consumption date. Either way, our computer was safe, and my father did not have a fight in the hallway to protect his family, yes, but mostly to protect that large, off-white computer.

I remember, on those hot nights, sweating it out in my bedroom with the window open in vain, the sounds of the night. Those sounds scared me then, and the only thing that would offer me hope was the happy sounds of a tour boat pushing through the darkness, the patrons laughing and eating and dancing as it went. I remember the sounds of the bands that played, and for a moment those sounds were enough to get me over the horrible sounds of the nasty raccoon wars that played out night after night. I was nothing but a child in a room with a singular window who was very, very afraid of the dark.

And so it was, a night a few nights ago, having long since conquered my fear of the night and of the dark, that I found myself on my front porch doing nothing but listening. The summer night is filled with revelers and with those seeking to suck every last drop of fun out of the most fun time of year, but beyond that a summer night is filled with sound. It can, in fact, be nearly deafening. I stood on my porch, surrounded by the hay field that is my lawn, hemmed in by the trees that form the border of my property, unable to see a single light belonging to any home or structure in any direction. I didn’t speak, I didn’t move, I just listened. The symphony is quite remarkable, with each insect or amphibian group playing its part. The melody rarely wavering, the chorus never repeating, instead just a steady tune, unable to be hummed or sung, but pleasing any way.

I walked that night, down the gravel driveway, so far as I made it near to the road where nary a car or a pedestrian passed. I looked back to the house, a dim glow throwing from each window of that long white house, the steep ridge line pushing up against the night sky that suddenly looked bright and alive with stars and the glow of a distant city that was really no more than a small town. The night noise continued, the crickets and the hoppers holding the main line, while frogs chimed in with slower bass, not necessarily rhythmically but certainly not in any contrasting way that would cause the tune to be anything but perfect. Bats fluttered over head, greedily gobbling up mosquitoes, likely cursing the cooler weather that has made those gnatty suckers fewer. The air was still, with no wind felt or heard. I walked back towards the house, slowly.

If I were a thief, I would be one only in the summer. To be a thief in the winter is to contend with all the crunching snow and the stillness of the cold night air. There is the issue of the tracks left in the snow, and even if you were to carry a broom made especially for thieves, there’s no way that you could successfully sweep over your tracks, steal some things, and then sweep over your tracks again all the way back to your getaway car without leaving marks that the cops would trace back to you the next day mostly due to the make of your broom and the fact that everyone, even cops, know that those brooms were sold at a special thieves store and that they have your face on the surveillance camera from three days ago when you bought it just after you were also photographed in the women’s clothing store buying pantyhose.

But to be a thief in summer is to be surrounded by noise, by the sweet sounds of a summer night. And if we were planning to be thieves in summer, and we were let out at the road by the driver of a getaway car, and we walked to the house, quietly, thief like, there’s a very good chance that all of our thiefly intentions would be washed away by the purity of the sounds that flow throughout a summer night. There can be no mischief when listening to such an orchestra, which means that the family in the house is safe, along with their newer Mac computer.