Around the time of my daughter’s second birthday we went camping at a park that had Airstream™ campers instead of cabins. I adore Airstream™ campers and aspire to someday own one, though most likely I will never be able to afford a driveway to park it in.

We arrived in the afternoon, and eventually the sun set (as it does) and the lack of streetlights and buildings left the outside world a pristine shade of nothing. All the windows of the trailer were pitch black.

My daughter had never before experienced this. She is a Brooklyn™ child, free range and urban oriented. The silence (which also was new), mixed with the absolute lack of light (as if the sun had closed its eyes), precipitated a sound in her that we had never heard before, a kind of low trill, like a rumble, or a gentle waking snore.

My wife was extremely excited about this trip; she was raised in California™ where “the outside” was always somehow closer to “the inside” than where I grew up, in the American Midwest, where we employed the clever technology of “screen doors” to protect us from “the outside world”… although most of the year this proved far too permeable a barrier.

“Let’s go outside!” she said in her best and most enthusiastic Mom voice.

The deep creak continued to emanate from the child. It grew not louder, but perceptibly more intense. She somehow was able to make the noise both while inhaling as well as exhaling.

“It’s awful… dark out there, Sweetie.” I said.

“Yeah, it’s great!” At that my wife opened the door of the trailer and stepped out, walking into the night. It took about seven steps before she was out of the glow of the trailer’s ambience, and disappeared completely. I agreed that seeing the stars might be fun, but thought we might begin by turning off all the inside lights and looking out the window, then maybe braving going out and looking all around.

“C’mon!” her disembodied voice called from the void.

My daughter’s rumble was now paired with a widening of the eyes and gentle stiffening of both legs and arms.

“Whatssamatter??” my wife called again.

I thought the situation was clear. That was my mistake. I felt that the idea of explanation at this point was not only moot but unnecessary. But people are different, built from a world of experiences, and the gift of true friendship is welcoming alternative perspectives.

“I… think she’s afraid of the dark a little.” I said to the inky nowhere.

There was a pause. “Why?”

Now I responded with a pause of my own, as I had never personally considered the logic behind what-I-had-always-assumed-to-be universal opinion. There I stood, in the middle of the woods, at the open door of a fragile aluminum tube I would be sleeping in that night, contemplating the very root of fear. How best to sum this complex primal instinct?

“Uh… it think it’s ‘cause you can’t see anything.” Genius. The words, indeed, of a poet, an intellectual, a true thinker of thoughts.

My wife was understandably underwhelmed. “You’ve gotta let your eyes adjust! You can see the stars!!”

I turned to my daughter.

“Ok, Mama is really excited about us going adventuring out there. You remember what it looked like before, right? Well it looks just like that right now, only we can’t see it so well. But I’m gonna give you this -”

and here I handed her a flashlight. A good one, with that beam that looks like a lightsaber…

“ - and you can light stuff up. And then we will look at the stars, and then we’ll come back in. Is that ok?”

Rumble. She held the flashlight, considering it.

“I’ll carry you the whole way, okay?”

At that, she agreed. I picked her up and walked carefully down the folding aluminum stairs into the night. She pointed the flashlight beam ahead of us, finding her mom by the two wooden lounge chairs a few yards away.

Fascinated by the power of the flashlight, my daughter lit up trees and grass and our car parked beside the rented camper. Then she looked up.

“You can’t really see them with the flashlight on, Honey. C’mon, trust Mama.”

My daughter’s trill stopped. She took two deep breaths. Then, she CLICK!ed off the flashlight.

As if by magic, suddenly above us were galaxies of light. Z pointed out different constellations. The light we had left on in the trailer seemed very far away from us.

After three minutes, the flashlight clicked back on. My daughter had heard a noise of some kind in the woods. I myself could not immediately identify it.

“I think that’s it for now.” I said.

We all went back inside. We turned off all the lights in the trailer, and through the illogical safety of the window screens, looked outside at the endless stars.

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