andamu

It is 9.45 p.m. as I leave the lab to head home. As I open the door I step from the stale air in the airlocked foyer into the cool, luminous evening air. The turf on the terraced berm rising in front of me folds the earth in a dark velvet, the color barely hinted at in the evening light; the light breeze teases my nostrils with the definite yet subtle perfume from the posies of tiny white flowers on the trees where later clusters of berries will ripen from green to red, for birds to conduct festivals overflowing with food.

It is a shame to open the car door and get inside, once again isolating me from the summer's evening. The dusk is lighter in the west, but the sky has a bluish sheen to the east, and around the northern side it appears greenish, an eau de nil, fading to transparency overhead.

A hand lifted in a wave to the security guard in the guard house who looks up from the magazine she is reading in a low puddle of light, her face lit up as she mouthes "Have a nice evening."

Waiting for a girl with a backpack to complete crossing the road and join her companion who is impatiently waiting with one foot on his scooter, before taking the turn into the forested area, surrounded by ancient pines towering into the sky, so tall they seem to meet across the wide divided four-lane cutting through. Up and up and up they draw the eye until, dizzy with inverse vertigo and aching from the crick in the neck at the unaccustomed angle, the spell is broken and the eye is returned to the sparse evening traffic.

Moving northwards, the trees thin, suddenly to turn into flat; nothingness until the houses across the field, a school up ahead, and Mount Hood a presence to the right, unseen at this hour, but forceful in the way that its existence it known.

Soon after the road narrows to undivided single lanes the buildings thin, a tall, dense, long line of cypresses lining the road to the west, petering out into two or three scattered massive pines, to be intersected by the high voltage pylons spaced across the dog runs on the left, jumping the road, and then marching off to the right where the field falls away and the view is clear all the way to the foothills of the mountains, the pylons becoming tiny as ants, an exercise in perspective painting.

Nudging the nose of the car around the last pine, westward, the last splashes of color from the sunset come into view; a bright orange smear here, a reddish puddle over there, smidgens of yellow gold sprinkled around, playing through the patchy cloud.

As I keep heading west, I watch as the creeping darkening blue-green of the night sky slowly overwhelms and engulfs the last fading traces of the sun. And yet the sky is bright, luminous and transparent, the clouds like untidy pencil smudges and a blotchy copybook.

Rejoining the main road, and the traffic, and the built-up area, I head north again, the final stretch to home, albeit a long one. Halfway there the houses again fall away, with only copses of trees breaking the flat green expanse of the meadow. But unlike the earlier pastoral stretch, this one has traffic, and traffic lights. And suddenly, instead of enchanting and comforting, the red and green patterns floating in air, the white and red lights snaking in parallel, moving in opposite directions, seem obscene, out of place in this moment where a summer evening turns into a summer night, amid the meadow and trees and the foothills, the frail clouds and the sparse winking stars.

And then I am home in the warm yellow light spilling into the corners, with warm mellow laughter. And outside it is still a magical summer night, but none of us knows, none of us shares it anymore.