Lakes Region After Dark
Not that kind of after dark. The kind with frogs.
Sometime after college, probably while the kids were young enough to demand it, I became a morning person. Ask anyone who’s tried to text me after nine at night. But this summer, for reasons I can’t fully explain beyond the heat, I keep finding myself still awake, still out, long past when I’d normally have called it. I still get my sunrise. The dogs make sure of that. But more mornings than not lately, I let them out, take in the light, and go straight back to bed.
Which means I’ve been getting to know the other end of the day instead.
There’s a version of this I already knew - the gloaming. The mountains in summer haze go soft, a blue you don’t get any other time of year, nothing like the crisp white-edged outlines they wear all winter when the snow sharpens every ridge line. The sky does its part too, some nights orange and red like it means it, other nights just lilac fading into grey, less dramatic but somehow harder to look away from. I’ve loved this hour for years.
What’s new (to me) is what happens a few hours after it. After the color drains out and the mountains disappear and it’s just dark, actually dark, in a way that surprises people who are used to street lights and population density.
Two nights ago I was in Laconia for dinner, which meant about an hour home, most of it along the shoreline on Route 28. Windows down because no matter how humid the day, evening usually cools nicely and there was a great breeze. And for long stretches of that drive, I couldn’t see a single one of the houses I usually catch myself looking at, the ones I clock out of habit more than nosiness. I knew they were there, but other than the odd one with a bbq happening in the backyard or the porch light left on, they were invisible. All I had was the road winding in front of me, the lake on my left doing its best impression of nothing at all, and Gunstock and then Mount Major holding their shape against the sky on my right, more felt than seen.
Coming through Alton, the bandstand with it lights caught me the way it always does, hovering there over the bay like an echo out of time. I thought I loved the lights on it best in winter (but that might be because the turn on that time of year at 4 pm so I see them a lot more), but they do something special in summer too. Foster’s Tavern was doing whatever Foster’s Tavern does most nights, and every time someone opened the door I got a few bars of music before it shut again.
By the time I hit Middleton I’d turned my own music off so that the marsh could take over. Frogs, crickets, one bird I couldn’t place calling every so often like it had somewhere to be. It was loud in a shocking, visceral way. No canned meditation soundtrack of “wilderness at night,” those frogs have business to attend to.
A mile or so on, off the main road, I stopped by a farmer’s field, just because I could, to sit on the hood of the car for a while. No plan. Just stars. Fifteen minutes, give or take, and not one car passed the whole time. No shooting stars, no satellites sliding across, nothing performing for me. Just a very ordinary, very enormous number of stars, and a breeze that kept carrying the frog chorus to me, and the kind of cool air that only shows up once the sun’s been gone for a while. I paid a tax of a few mosquito bites for the privilege.
I thought I might feel small out there. That’s usually the line, isn’t it, alone in a field at night, all those stars. But I didn’t. I just felt content. Like the night had made room for me instead of reminding me how much of it I wasn’t part of.
Most towns up here roll the sidewalks up by nine, even in the thick of summer. I never really worried about that because I was usually headed towards bed by then anyway. Turns out life up here is still happening whether I’m awake for it or not. I’m just glad I’ve been staying up to experience it this summer.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
