This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
For several years in the 1980s, there was a night janitor at a local college library who was as interesting as any of the books. As with many school janitors, sweeping was only a cover job; his real purpose for working in a library was to corner patrons who came there eager for knowledge and set them straight before they reached the shelves of books and became contaminated.
All books were suspect; science books especially were in a conspiracy to block out the truth. Any willing listener browsing among the dim stacks in the library recesses got free lectures. Leaning on his broom, looking straight into your eyes, Al explained the secrets of the universe. How every star sent out unfelt waves to earth. Corn stars caused corn to grow, wheat stars, wheat. "It's the same soil," he said. "How else can the seed know which plant to grow." There were bad stars, too, cancer stars and diabetes stars, and asthma stars one needed to avoid. Rays coming at you from everywhere.
Al was especially good when it came to darkness. Most people, he explained, didn’t understand that darkness was real. Even college science teachers, he scoffed, believed that dark was merely the absence of light.
All wrong, said Al. As the sun rises in the morning, and as its rays grow stronger and stronger, they begin to push the darkness back into the earth, but when the sun goes down in the evening, the darkness pushes up against the weakening rays and emerges from the earth.
He had proof: "Stretch you hand out on a sunny day. You block the sun's rays, and sure enough, there on the ground is a shadow, darkness coming up out of the ground, until you take your hand away and the sun pushes the darkness back.”
I never used to be afraid of my own shadow. And I'm sure Al is wrong. I trust books. But I can't quite shake the notion that that shadow I cannot outrun is my own darkness, always coming at me out of the ground. But that can't be, can it?
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
