First There Was Alice And The Stars, Then Just Street Lights

The aberrant illumination that overlays the Earth’s nightside arose as much from an ancient fear of the dark as from a primordial love of the light. Just after World War II, this global web of light spun a strand into the four square blocks which were my hometown in Ohio.

Our small town had not, however, existed entirely in the dark. On the street in front of my grandfather’s general store hung a 300-watt filament. My grandfather switched it on at dusk when he closed the store and turned it off when he opened for business the next morning. It sufficed for most who came and went along our familiar, friendly streets.

But then a rival town hung lights at the corners of each of their six square blocks. That marked the beginning of the end of the night we had always known.

Two factions formed among our townsfolk: those who valued the unmarred twilight, stars and glow of early dawn, and those who imagined a bright light on every street corner might somehow be a symbol of prosperity and progress. Around the stove in the general store, across back fences, on porches facing the unlighted streets, the debate unfolded.

The “progressives” were mostly young war vets who had seen and admired the world’s lighted sights.

The “starry nighters” were village elders who cherished the natural progression of dawn to dusk to starry night. Allied to the latter group was our brigade of kids who wanted the night left to dark-dependent games of kick-the-can, the capture of lightning bugs and the occasional taking of a ripe watermelon from a summer garden.

The leader of our Starry Night Brigade was Crazy Alice. Alice lived alone in a falling-down, porch-sagging house, its clapboards weathered clean of any whisper of paint. About 80, give or take a decade, Alice was not suffering any true craziness, but was eccentric in dress and manner, an aged but spry flower child doing her own thing 20 years before the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. She was also a collector of all things printed.

Her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom, her outhouse held piles of books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, flyers, broadsides, posters, calendars, catalogs, notebooks and letters. They were stacked on chairs and window sills, perched precariously on tables, overflowing from bookcases, piled high on every foot of floor.

Alice was a scholar. But more than that, and what made her the leader of us kids, was that she was also an amateur astronomer.

When the sky was clear, she held impromptu classes of the heavens for those of us who drifted to her porch. She pointed out the seas and craters of the moon, the seasonal wanderings of planets, the configurations of constellations wheeling overhead.

Often unlimbering a telescope she had constructed herself, she allowed us to squint through the polished lenses at whatever heavenly object happened to be in her sights.

But 20 yards from her ramshackle observatory was a street corner where, if the progressives had their way, a light would likely be installed. And with that placement there would be no more truly dark nights or unobstructed observations from Alice’s porch. Even the surrounding fields would be less dark once the full, townwide array of illumination was ignited and began casting its glow into the corners of the night.

Near the end of summer, the young progressives did win out and the street lights were ordered. In early fall, the lights arrived at our town’s small train depot. One by one the poles were erected and the lights strung. The power switch would be thrown on Halloween night, two weeks hence. It was then that Crazy Alice began camping out in her cornfield.

Every night, all night, in the midst of harvested cornstalks, she sat in an overstuffed chair she had dragged from her porch. She vowed not to budge until the town agreed to cancel the impending sacrilege of her dark and sacred nights. She would not be dissuaded.

The county sheriff proclaimed she was breaking no law. It was her cornfield and she was entitled to sit in it. From her new location, Alice continued to lecture and point out the heavenly sights, even after her voice became hoarse and she developed a dry, rasping cough.

Three days before Halloween, a wicked wind rose from the north. The nights turned clear and chill. The stars glittered like ice crystals, the moon was a cold sliver. Covered in blankets, almost hidden within the folds of an Army overcoat, a wool watchcap holding fast her wild white hair, Alice persisted in her protest.

The night before the lights were to come alive, she developed a fever. Her cough grew worse. On Halloween eve, the town doctor drove into the cornfield, bundled Alice into his Packard, and drove her to the nearest hospital.

The street lights did come on that night, and we all stood blinking into that pale version of daylight. We saw that even the brightest stars had become bleached reflections above the veil of light. The streets were definitely less dark, but the night was disturbingly diminished.

Still unwell, Alice came home just after Thanksgiving. But she never again spoke of the stars or set up her telescope for us. Shuttering herself away with her books and papers and thoughts, she discouraged all visitors.

Near Christmas, my grandfather stopped by with her uncollected mail and a few groceries. He found her next to a cold stove, lifeless eyes fixed on some dazzling, distant radiance residing in an eternal night sky forever undimmed by the grandiose glimmerings of this mortal realm.

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