By Gladys Haunton

A bucket list doesn’t interest me. The thought of marvels I will never see, adventures I will never have, brings me no more regret than would a hedgerow of wild plums with too much fruit to pick. Were you to tell me, though, on a sun-struck day in August, that I am picking plums for the last time, regret might drop me to my knees. I’ve reached an age where time pressures me to identify the acts that have satisfied me deeply, determine which are still possible for me, and then repeat those as often as possible. Folding beaten egg whites into thick batter. Pausing under an awning to shake rainwater from a half-furled umbrella. Walking down a flight of wide marble steps. Who could have guessed the value such moments would eventually take on?

What if I never watch a skein of geese cross the face of a full moon? Or smell goldenrod picked from a roadside ditch? I do what I can to defer such losses. On the coldest mornings, for instance, I alter my route to the coffee shop to increase my chance of seeing sun dogs where steam from the medical center rises through the morning light.

Other joys are gone for good. Brittle bones forbid that I ever again glide along the oval of a roller-skating rink, crossing ankle over ankle as I round the tight end curves to the rhythm of canned music. Nor will I dive again from a rocky crag into a lake. In cases like these, I work at acceptance

Some delights totter on the cusp between Truly Over and Maybe Once More. These are rife with urgency. One, especially, has become my obsession: I want another opportunity to enter at night as an intruder into a dark building.

I have explored a derelict barn by moonlight as a teen, broken into a gymnasium for a midnight swim when I was slightly older, and, still later, trespassed in an uninhabited Victorian mansion with a For Sale sign on its lawn. Why should fear of losing nights like these deliver such a belly-blow of sadness? Prowling in an unlit space is not a whiskers-on-kittens variety of favorite thing. I want to understand the power of the appeal. But for that I feel I must find one more abandoned outbuilding under a quarter moon.

The adventure I’m picturing is wildly inappropriate for a person my age. I’ve no idea how to find a site to explore now that my days of cruising with friends through country lanes and city alleys are far behind me. And while the physical and legal risks I’m craving might befit the young, to seek them this late in life is foolhardy and yet compelling—as if those earlier adventures were prelude to the night encounter I’m still supposed to have.

The earlier adventures. They return to me first as muscle memories of precariousness as I edged toward the forbidden barn, gymnasium, and mansion. Each time I moved through the exposed area between the car I came in and the building I intended to invade, body coordination became a mental chore rather than a reflex, as if the most primitive, protective part of my brain struggled to derail my adventure and protect me from my foolishness. Apprehension rewrote the metrics of motion, making every step a conscious effort, a should-I-shouldn’t-I decision point. I was a good girl breaking laws, and to escape detection I was doing so at an hour when I literally could not see what I was getting myself into. I blame my clumsiness on fear of the obvious risks. Detection by authorities. Injury from some physical danger that daylight would have revealed. Confrontation with the mystery that darkness represents in folklore and nightmares.

The choice to go on made me a different person from the one who might have turned back. To continue toward the barn, the pool, the mansion, I had to leave behind my more timid identity and become a bolder, badder self.

Yes. That is key to my yearning. It’s unbearable to think that I might never again stumble through ambivalence toward the peril of personal growth. I want to tap into my stores of potential to find them still abundant. I want evidence that when my body resists, I can still urge it forward through the courage of my conviction that risk enriches and fear energizes, that I am not yet as rash and intrepid as I could become.

Something more is needed, though, to explain why I want a dark, forbidden structure for testing my mettle. Something that happens once I’ve mastered the approach, breached whatever barrier was meant to keep me out, and trained all my attention on the space within.

Full attention is a heady state. In each of my trespasses, gaining entry meant sudden immersion into experience stripped of visual clues, making unprecedented demands on the powers of attention. The absence of sight kicked alertness into super drive, and all my other senses grappled to give it direction. They attended fiercely to stimuli, and they engraved impressions into memory where I find them now still sharp and resonant. The barn, for all its years of disuse, smelled of dust on horsehide, sweaty saddles, pigeons, and sunbaked hay. The pool returns to me as scents of chlorine, mildewed floor drains, and cold cement. The mansion’s impressions changed by room from cooking grease to dog bedding to warm carpets to talcum powder. Each environment was redolent of past inhabitants, animal and human, their individualities suspended in the air like dust motes. 

Hearing, too, amped up its powers, though its memory traces do not so much distinguish among my adventure sites as preserve a commonality. I thought I heard the respirations of each setting. Inhalation, exhalation, be it summer air through hay mow, water circulating through the chlorination system, or local traffic shushing past a window. Or the night-preserved breath rhythms of all the life forms ever to pump lungs within this space.

At this point, every time, a shift in psychic weight kicked in—the bolder me discovering her slightly altered center of gravity, sensory organs renegotiating their roles and responsibilities. I felt enlarged, spread open to a hyper-state that was not just fight-or-flight vitality, but a readiness to perceive what we have not been taught to perceive. My skin gained dominance, as if its every exposed surface took readings and telegraphed them to my brain. I thought I knew a bat’s echolocation or a spider’s spot-on responsiveness to a tremor in the far reaches of its web. I did not actually gain measurable new powers, of course, but openness to such miracles flooded me like a drug. I felt separated from the night’s mysteries by the slightest error of conditioning, my reliance on daylight no more than an unfortunate habit.

I want to do that again. Find dark places where I should not go and discover there the palpable nearness of what I cannot know. I want to re-encounter the more brazen me not just to prove she lives, but to find once more what only she has shown me—that our access to the world is limited by our familiar practices of perception. When risk releases a surge of adrenaline and that hormone load comes to the aid of a body struggling with light deprivation, a vestigial system of neglected ganglia revives. The effect is like discovering yourself on the verge of flying. I imagine that a caterpillar feels this wave of incipience in the darkness of pupation, just before the cocoon splits, delivering the one-time worm to weightlessness and lift.

That sounds like resurrection.

Is that why I’m driven toward adventures now, when my age positions me so near the ultimate night? Maybe age explains the urge. The urgency. I need to practice for salvation. I need to learn the necessary skills to release one way of knowing—one plane of being—and to enter something absolutely other. I want to overcome reluctance, relinquish with good grace all I have depended on to read the world I’ve lived in. If the final night holds beauty at its core, let me be ready to discern it there. Let me practice for this challenge. Maybe tonight. Maybe in that crumbling equipment shed out beyond the gravel pit.

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Gladys Haunton has taught writing and literature at Creighton University, Nebraska Methodist College, and Iowa Western Community College. Her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.