It is late at night and the rain is steady, soft. I pull on a raincoat and step out of the house into the darkness. As I cross the driveway a fat toad hops slowly by, mottled and bumpy. Hop. Hop. Hop. It disappears into the shadows of a stone wall. I continue toward the tree, watching the horizon. The lightning is nearly continual—not bolts, but flashes that light up masses of cloud from the inside. I try to avoid climbing the tree when there is lightning, but it is growing late and the risk seems reasonable, and, more to the point, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful night and I want to climb the tree.
Lightning flashes twice in the time it takes me to climb the treehouse ladder and step into the branches: first to the north, then to the northwest. It’s warm out and the rain is so inviting I shrug off the raincoat and drop it to the floor of the treehouse. I stand there a minute. There is a quality of fullness to the night, of things near my face, of falling water and moving air and a flashing sky. The darkness is thronging with things I can’t quite see, but everything feels alive: as though if I put a hand in front of my face I will touch something that will shoot away. Is the air full of insects? Am I brushing against leaves? I start up the tree, moving carefully among the wet branches, climbing upwards through the rumbling air.
The sky luminesces four or five more times as I make my way up, and each time I pause to watch the black silhouette of leaves and branches against the white clouds. I think of a line by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black / Ever so black on it.” There is something dragonish about the shape of the branches, reaching out from the trunk, heavy and bristling with leaves.
When I reach my perch I stand and lean back against the trunk. Every few moments the sky flashes and thunder shakes the air. The toad has stayed with me. For some reason it has evoked a visceral sense of a specific character from Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away, in which the night is thronging with strange spirits and spirit-animals. This deepens the feeling I already have of the night being inhabited, of being as alive with beings as it is with water, sound, electricity. Perhaps Toad was a gatekeeper who handed me off to the world of spirits, here in this tree that on other nights is just branches and me, serene but empty.
I am learning to trust these experiences. I think that in their way they may be as true as any other.
