the dawn

Another dawn. The Dawn. It’s has been a long time coming. It’s dark out. We bundle up against the remnant chill from last night’s gale. Reception’s not open. We’ll be back to drop the keys later. Where we are, there isn’t much out but the predawn halcyon, and us; nary too many streetlamps, and the stars. Even the waves have calmed. We pause a moment, reddened noses in the air. We could be wolves singing to the moon, or a hungry child smelling his way home. Filling our lungs with the last of night’s crisp, cold air. The fleeting smell of earth, and rain, and salty sea. Stomping our bed-warmed feet. It echoes. Just a moment – we have a dawn to catch. Hurry, I huff. The car is too cold, it revs, and dies down. I look out the window, fogged from my breaths. The little township is still asleep. The quiet is a little, disquieting. It settles in around you like a thick, obsidian fog you can’t shake off. The stately colonial mansion that was our respite for the night loomed behind us. The sun dappled second-floor verandah where we’d beheld twin rainbows over the distant pier was cordial no longer. How antagonistic the night, so grand, so haunting. It could eat us up, and no one would notice. The engine coughs, and sputters, and comes to life. Curiously, much like Old Tom at the Bottle of Milk from last dinner. He’d told us to turn up at the police post, at an unintelligible corner. He could have well mumbled post office. We trudge along, every crunch of the tires deafening in the silence. By luck, we get the right turn. I alternately exclaim over all the quaint houses which sit on the hillside, and squeal at any sign that told us we were in the right direction. Some signs are new, state-issued standards. Others are rustic. Hand painted angels of excitement. I peer through the rear window. The sky’s lightening! Hurry! Streaks of light have pierced the night’s embrace in a far corner of the heavens; the ocean and sky parting ways from their tender copulation in night’s abyss. An undefined, endless dark. We make a final turn, the road climbs no more. The car squelches off the tar and onto mud, and gravel. It’s overgrown, somewhat, and mostly unlit. Night’s ominousness lends a netherworldly unease. We can barely see beyond that which the headlights expose. There! The final directive. I glance up as I exit the warmth of the car into the chill, again – dawn skirmishes with the darkness, the lightness beginning to blossom. We scurry through the underbrush towards the day, the fleeting tendrils of night whispering cold breaths against the nape of my neck. Teddy would have been proud. I could almost feel his presence as liquid gold poured through the sky, the elusive pot of gold from the previous day’s rainbows spilling across the ocean. I’d caught dawn at Lorne, my great adventure.