Dawn

 (ok this is actually a sunset, but you get the idea)

I woke up before 4am and couldn't sleep. We usually wake at 4am for work, and usually I am an enormous pain in the ass to drag out of bed, but today was Sunday, our obligatory day off, a day to sleep in til 7. For some reason, though, my mind started cranking and I could tell it wasn't going to stop. I got up, walked down the dark hall to the main room of the house. Didn't switch the light on, knowing it would beam into the bedroom windows where Bobby was still asleep. Sat in the dark for a little while, then stepped outside into the night.

It was dead quiet. No wind, no crickets chirping or katydids sawing, even the sea's ever-present roar seemed hushed. I saw a gleam flash in a breadfruit tree as I scanned the yard with my headlamp. It was a bat's eyes, two shining marbles hanging down from a branch. They blinked out as the bat took off silently. Still looking at the place where the bat had been, I suddenly saw the breadfruit tree, in its wholeness, as a being that started as a seed and captured the sun's energy to grow its giant leaves and produce fruit that fall to the ground and become mushy fly buffets writhing with the possibility of more trees. The stuff I knew intellectually could be sensed, quite viscerally, all at once; its lifespan crunched into a moment. The sort of visions only possible in the hush before dawn.

I walked down the slope to the beach. I put my feet in the edge of the ocean – the ragged fringe of a quilt that covers half the globe, ever billowing in the wind, its wrinkles crumpling up on shores everywhere. The water reflected strangely in the glow of my headlamp, like a rack of eerily undulating buns. I wondered if sharks were slicing through the wet dark, inches from my vulnerable toes. A sliver of moon hung high above and a few stars winked through the clouds. As the first light of dawn appeared, I could just barely make out forms of bats flying over the reef and ghost crabs standing on the sand. I wondered if they'd been there in the darkness or just awakened by the promise of day. It was lunchtime on the east coast, where many people I know and love were probably enjoying mimosas and Sunday brunch after a weekend of ringing in the New Year.

I walked up onto the runway to see the sun rise. A small window of pale peach and tangerine opened on the horizon between Olosega and Ta'u, framed by curling gray clouds. A San-Fransisco-like belt of fog drifted between the islands, too, silhouetting the towers of Olosega Point. The sky filled with black shadows circling in the still air above the mountain and the shore: hundreds of bats! What were they doing up there, far from the fruit they eat? One was moving too slowly, wings held rigid like passenger plane – a frigate bird sailing west. Two others were moving too fast, darting and curving together – a pair fairy terns, their identity revealed like a magic trick, black silhouettes against the dim dawn transformed instantly to white with the shadowed ridge as backdrop. Plovers, poised like ghostly ballerinas, appeared on the runway – were they always there? As if suddenly noticing me, too, a rail shrieked and darted across the road. It was almost chilly.

I don't often get to experience dawn so peacefully; standing still, watching the palette transform, witnessing animals start their day. Usually I am happy enough to catch glimpses of it between scrambling to start my day. Standing there, I realized how unbearably lonesome life would be without the multitudes of other creatures going about their own lives, whether we care to notice or not.

Sunlight had yet to penetrate the kitchen when I returned. I flipped the light switch and saw a gecko run across the wall. A crab clung to the counter's edge and another perched on the sponge. They all skittered away to their daytime hiding places, and, despite the mess they make, I was glad to know they were there.