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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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It's the tail-end of summer in Australia, and the weather in Sydney has cooled down significantly from the January highs. During this time of year, I start doing something I don't bother to attempt in the sweltering summer heat: I walk around my neighbourhood. This is something I do whenever I feel stuck or trapped in some way. Usually I do it at night, under the cover of darkness - hardly anybody is around at that time, and there's a refreshing crispness to the night air once the transition into the shoulder seasons begins.
In the daytime, walking in Sydney almost feels fatiguing to me, with the crowds and the harsh, direct sunlight. The city is another universe entirely once the sun goes down, after the streets empty out and the shops close. In fact, the shopfronts and offices look far more enticing to me when they're not trying to look inviting - instead of bustling supermarkets and convenience stores, there are darkened halls filled with rows and rows of vacant aisles, instead of offices there are these yawning chambers filled with desks and blacked-out computers, still lit, tantalisingly evocative in their emptiness. Often, I look through these big glass panes, wishing I could enter so I could sit silently in these dim rooms and hallways. Places like that evoke a deep longing and emptiness, and despite the fact that it's not a feeling people seem to seek out I can't help but be drawn to them sometimes.
Doing these walks at night is also a heightened experience, at least compared with walking during the day. I think part of the reason for this is because they're fairly unsettling, which doesn't sound desirable, but that discomfort is something that throws the whole experience into stark relief and helps clear the mind; the apprehension of immediate physical threat often shakes one out of that sense of mundanity and complacency that bleeds into everyday life. Fear of the dark has been imprinted into every single inch of our neural circuitry, and most of our hominid ancestors were certainly not apex predators; for much of our evolutionary history an isolated individual would have been easy pickings for sabre-toothed cats and Pachycrocuta hyenas. Even in an urban environment every single dark corner and rustle in the bushes triggers a fear response, and I find the heightened sensations almost addictive in a way.
Sometimes, the fear is caused by an actual threat. Statistically speaking my neighbourhood is relatively safe, but there are points where walking around at night has gotten dicey; probably the most unsettling experience I've had was a time when I ran into a group of people - one woman, two men - who seemed a little... off. As soon as they saw me, the woman walked right up to me, and began to ask me a barrage of questions. At first the questions were innocuous, she'd ask "Why are you out this late? What are you doing out here?", but they quickly escalated. Eventually I was being asked "What's in your bag? Do you have a gun in there?", all while the the two men were slowly advancing from the back. I turned around and began to walk away, and heard them following me. I felt almost giddy once I escaped into the safety of my apartment building.
There's a specific spot in my neighbourhood I stop at virtually every time I go on night walks. One of the apartment buildings near me has a recess which extends upwards for about twelve floors or so, and when you stand inside there and and look up, you can see towering walls of glass and concrete on all sides, all glowing with warm light. The sky, from here, seems almost as if it's receding into the distance; it's a small keyhole of blackness that looks impossibly distant from this vantage point. I wouldn't say it's a remotely good or even competent piece of architecture, the building is quite alienating, but I keep returning partially because it doesn't seem like something that should exist - it almost feels like a scene from a Gmod map transplanted straight into my neighbourhood. It doesn't feel like a real place.
These walks put me in strange moods. Sometimes I get the urge to follow in the footsteps of a Holden Ringer or Anton Nootenboom and walk in one direction, with just a backpack or trolley for my belongings, and only stopping to sleep or to rest. It would be so easy for me to walk west, and in a very short span of time, I'd exit my neighbourhood and cross into the suburbs. Eventually I'd leave the Sydney urban sprawl entirely, travel across the spectacular mountains and canyons and eucalypt forests of the Great Dividing Range, and enter the sprawling western plains. These lush farms would give way to cattle ranches, and the ground would slowly turn ruddy under my feet, red earth stretching far into the distance as storms gathered on the horizon. And I would keep walking, right into the charred centre of the continent, past dunes and mesas and large swaths of beautiful jump-up country, and when the towns eventually became too dispersed for me to feasibly travel them I'd divert my route southwards, to more populated areas of the country, until I could walk west again. I'd walk, and walk, and walk, until I wore myself out, until there was no more ground to cover, until I finally reached the sparkling shores of the Indian Ocean.
Often I think about - and romanticise - the lives of premodern merchants travelling the sea routes of the Maritime Silk Road. Unlike its overland counterpart, where merchants usually traded in a singular local area they specialised in and goods travelled the whole length of the Silk Road only by changing hands many times, a merchant travelling the Maritime Silk Road could travel a very long section of the trade route in one go. It connected societies as disparate as Persia, Java and China, and at its most northerly extent the route went all the way to Korea and Japan. Undoubtedly this was an unenviable and dangerous job, and they'd be vulnerable to a whole litany of risks ranging from storms to piracy during these long, lonely months spent at sea. But there is something exceptionally evocative about a life spent moving around constantly; much of your contact with the world would be the ocean, and your fragmented contact with human societies would consist of these brief vignettes of far-flung lands with cultures and traditions completely alien to yours. You'd be placeless, constantly moving, seeing things most people would never get to experience in one lifetime.
Such an experience is increasingly less common nowadays. The convenience of modern travel makes it easier to get around, but in an odd way, it also makes the world smaller and less interesting. Yes, the world has slowly become more homogenised due to how interconnected everything is, but part of it is also inherent to the mode of travel we use now. Travelling from Colombo to Guangzhou no longer requires you to sail into Southeast Asia and navigate around the Straits of Malacca, stopping at port towns all the while to restock and refuel; instead now you have the opportunity to travel straight from point A to point B, missing everything in between and depriving you of many valuable experiences you wouldn't have otherwise sought out yourself. I enjoy having the ability to shortcut between destinations as much as the next person, but I also deeply feel that something has been lost; it's a specific type of experience that many premodern couriers and merchants would have had, but is alien even to many modern travellers. The endless wastes in between your destinations are worth seeing to some extent, even if just to give you a visceral appreciation of how big and empty much of the world actually is, and sometimes there are things of value to be found in them.
I think there's a deep-seated need in me to roam, and as strange as it sounds, taking walks late at night satisfies that specific brand of wanderlust just a little bit. You're taking in a view of your city that isn't necessarily meant to be experienced by people, and you're not doing anything or going anywhere; you're walking just for its own sake. The very fact that there's not that much to do at all recontextualises your environment and makes it the sight in and of itself, and granted you don't always find something truly interesting, but when you do it pops even more because of the context in which you found it.
Perhaps, over the weekend, I'll take the train to the CBD in the early hours of the morning, and just walk around.
I enjoyed reading this. Thanks for posting it. :)
I watched a movie that had a somewhat similar theme yesterday. Gerry (2002). It's not a very good movie, but it starts up some thoughts due to the location and situation they're in. Two men lost in a huge desert landscape.
I'm not sure I'd had the balls to regularly walk around at night. Do you have any means of self defense?
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