For two nights we had heavier rains than any we'd seen since arriving on the island. Not sheets of it but walls, whole skyscrapers, a deluge pouring out of some vast Niagara Falls in the sky that concentrated its will in an effort to displace the ocean, tear open the Earth, and lay bare its molten core. It hammered on the metal roof of the shack like nails fired from ten million nail guns for hours at a time, and only at night. Not during the day, because it knew we don't sleep during the day, but at night, when it could make sleep impossible.
Imagine staying in a house where it has been arranged for someone to turn up in the evening and spend every hour until morning slamming doors, pounding walls, rattling the tables and chairs against the floor, screaming and swearing in vein-popping rage. We crawled from bed at sunrise like reverse vampires, eyes red-rimmed, brains murky with semi-consciousness, craving elephantine doses of caffeine.
Prior to these explosive downpours, the noisiest threat to our rest was the tradewinds. These kick up every couple of weeks, and blow with a ferocity that makes me wonder how a hurricane could be much worse. I've always liked strong, gusting winds, from the time I was a small child. Then, I felt thrilled as my surroundings were brought to maniacal life under the influence of an unseen force, like a roomful of toys jumping up and going to war. Trees dipping and swaying, leaves and bits of trash racing each other down the road, traffic signs twisting and wobbling as if about to be uprooted. During my boyhood, a windy day meant some excitement to spice up the dull routine of school and chores and homework.
Let's say that my attitude toward high winds has grown more nuanced, particularly in light of the last couple of months. They can be a relief from the mid-day heat when working without the benefit of shade, and bring a relaxing, rasping sigh from the unmowed fields of guinea grass. They also have decided that it might be fun to tear our shack to pieces, not that they've had any success. Bags of tea and containers of food might fly about like starlings, but wood and metal have remained firmly fastened together. My compliments to the builder.
If any of the sheets of black plastic we've placed around the shack to keep out rain have not been thoroughly nailed and stapled into place, the wind will snap them with a sound like the sharp pops of a snare drum. One such sheet is situated over the head of our bed; just as we drift off to sleep, the wind can billow it like a sail with a sudden crack that brings us fully awake. It can go on for hours, and has prompted us to buy earplugs to keep us from becoming half-insane from sleep deprivation.
That kind of noise, from either wind or rain, is in stark contrast to the average night out here in the weeds. There is a hush, a notable lack of mechanized sound, that only comes from living far outside a populated area. I've only encountered it before while camping in the Washington state rainforest. It would be disingenuous to call it silence. There is no silence in this place, it's alive with living sound at all times and at night, when sound carries farther, it's as if a voice that had elected to remain mute for an extended time has begun to murmur to itself audibly, muttering things that are weird and sinister, but nothing that makes complete sense.
Every sound is much more fearsome, much more fraught with the implication of an invasive entity, after the sun has gone down. You lay awake in bed, the moonlight as powerful as a streetlamp and framing each dark silhouette—the hanging clothes and hats and bags—with an icy, blue and silver luminescence. Timed to the subtraction of daylight, cicadas buzz like electricity coursing through a fog-dampened transformer, so loud it's only when they stop that you realize how much their buzzing has been pressing on your eardrums. Cows in the nearby pasture call and bellow, trying to find one another in the dark, vocalizing in ways you didn't think cows were able to, shouting like irritable human beings and braying like donkeys.
The breeze blows and the branches of the pigeon pea tree closest to the shack scrape on the tin roof like claws. Banana trees creak like old floorboards. Nocturnal geckos chirp and scuttle briefly on the wall outside. The hum of a moth's wingbeats pinballs around the shack for a while and then departs into the late chill. Each individual sound is magnified, projected as if amplified into the peaceful hours as you try to go to sleep. Something in the tall grass twenty feet away scurries, almost certainly a rat, but how can you tell when you can't see what's there? During moments like this you entertain thoughts of six-inch centipedes marching on their hundreds of legs across the ground and into the bed, aching to inject their painful venom into your skin.
There's more scurrying, louder now, and coming from different locations. A fight breaks out in the fallen leaves, followed by a chattering squeak. Now you know for sure it's rats. In time, if they haven't found something else to occupy them, one or more will make their way into the shack to run stealthily along the walls, scrounging what food scraps they can or whatever hasn't been securely locked away. You might hear them poking around under the bed, right beneath where your head rests on the pillow, scratching with their claws for reasons only a rat would be able to explain.
Or maybe tonight, for once, the rats aren't here. What comes in their place are phantom sounds, things you can't pinpoint or identify, and aren't able to fully visualize. The thing on the roof that wants to dig or chew its way through, slowly, its patient labor halfway between a scrape and a crunch. The thing that seems to dig at the outside corner of the shack next to the bed, keeping up its work for maybe half an hour before spending the rest of the night somewhere else, not as patient as its friend on the roof. Each single scuff and shuffle has an author, a creature doing its night-time work.
So let's assume you can't sleep. Your system is too full of adrenaline. You see no point in lying awake in bed when sleep might be a couple of hours away, so you get up—slowly, so as not to disturb your wife—and quietly step out into the night air. The moon is only half full, but already illuminates well enough that you don't need a flashlight to see by; you can even make out details of objects ten feet away. It's a cold light, a half-hearted cousin to the sun, but comforting in the way it pulls the veil of darkness partway back and lets you observe your surroundings with your eyes as well as your ears.
You look up into the colossal basalt ceiling of the sky, barely touched by the glowing domes of light from nearby towns, and it is vibrant with stars. It makes you regret that you didn't pay more attention to astronomy in school. What are the constellations you remember? That's Orion's Belt, you can find that one easily enough. And the Big Dipper, another easy one. The Little Dipper's around somewhere, maybe that's it over there. Is that Mars? Maybe. It's reddish, anyway.
There are more visible stars by far than you would ever see near the ambient glow of a city. So many that you can make out layers of them, dimmer stars behind—or beyond—the bright primary clusters, further out into space and dense to the point of creating something like a fog out of star vapor that makes you think of frozen clouds. You suspect they are the most remote fringes of the Milky Way, a distance of thousands, if not millions, of light years that is well beyond your ability to consciously grasp.
Like stars themselves, cruise ships appear to float in mid-air against the rich blackness where the ocean and the sky seamlessly meet. They glide slowly, languidly, and you wonder about the people out there on the water at this time of night. Most are probably asleep, but it could be that a few are still up and walking the decks. You wonder how much it costs to go on a cruise like that. Thousands, you figure. You wonder if any of the people out there have ever been on a vacation that didn't involve such luxury. Maybe when they were younger, on a road trip to California. Or maybe that cruise is the first vacation they've taken in years. Retirees and the overworked, parents whose kids have finally moved out of the house. You could put anyone on those ships from where you stand.
It's not silent, out here under the moon with a patch of dried grass under your feet, but it is still. Just the breeze, and the insects, and the waves pummeling the rocky shore at the base of the cliffs with a low rumble and persistent hiss, like the sound of a distant highway. Or the steady breathing of someone in the deepest part of sleep.
You yawn, run a hand over your face, feel the weary heat of your eyes when you close them. Your thoughts become listless and undirected, and urge you to go back inside.
After you have climbed, slowly and carefully, into bed, stretched yourself out and adjusted the pillow to its most comfortable position, it's the steady, whispering breath of the waves that follows you into unconsciousness, like an eternity of restful nights.
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