THE BEAUTY OF SHADOWS

Afew months ago, at the end of a fifty-kilometre ride, as I coasted home down the final stretch of bushland road that gently meanders through a forest of gnarled angophora, I was nearly knocked off my bike by a deer. There I was, minding my own business, when it sprang out of the roadside vegetation and nearly barrelled straight into me. There was less than a metre in it. The shock alone nearly killed me.

Granted, it was not entirely the deer’s fault. In fact, it was not even mainly the deer’s fault. Perhaps not even remotely the deer’s fault. It was after dark, and—given the roads around my place are quiet, the cars rare, the tar smooth and the potholes non-existent, and given there was a hint of moonlight—I had decided to ride the last few kilometres through the bush with my bike’s headlight switched off.

No doubt, I scared the hell out of the deer, too. In fact, there is probably a deer around somewhere now telling his mates at the pub about the time he was minding his own business crossing the road, when out of nowhere in the darkness sprang an idiot cyclist with his headlight switched off that nearly barrelled into him, with less than a metre in it. The shock alone, he would sombrely be telling his gathered friends as they cradle their beers—a difficult task, given deer have hooves and not hands—nearly killed him.

Now, a sensible reader (do Wild readers fall into that boat?) might be tempted to ask, why ride with my lights off? Well, firstly it was to engender different ways of seeing. I’ve ridden this road hundreds of times; doing it in darkness, however, forced me to see it afresh. The colour of the trees, of their leaves, branches, trunks, was gone. By seeing no more than monochromatic shadows, by no longer being distracted by the olive of the leaves or the almost blushed-apricot hue of the angophoras’ trunks, I focused on the trees’ shape alone, and on the writhing form of the branches interlocking over the road to form a shadowed tunnel.

There is, as 20th Century Japanese novelist Tanizaki Junichiro—whose writing I love—said, much to praise about shadows. While the hard clarity of light and sunshine diminishes wonder, darkness, and the inability to discern all but outlines, renders its own subtleties. In the secrets of those shadows and dimly viewed depths, beauty resides.

But my riding sans headlight wasn’t merely an aesthetic quest. It was also a search for adventure in small ways. We often think adventure only happens on ‘big trips’, but that mode of thinking is capacity limiting, because adventure surrounds us everywhere, if only we let it.

In recent years, the door to that realisation has been pried open a little; COVID’s lockdowns forced us to consider adventures close to home. I hope that mindset doesn’t leave us. There are so many elements that constitute any outing’s adventurousness—challenge; scale; risk; exoticism; aesthetics; audacity; uncertainty; novelty (in the sense of newness)—and while it’s true that it’s only on those bigger trips that some of these elements can be found, or at least more easily found, that’s not the case with all of them.

It was British adventurer Alistair Humphreys who coined the term ‘microadventure’. “A microadventure,” he says, “is an adventure that is short, simple, local, cheap—yet still fun, exciting, challenging, refreshing and rewarding.” He also adds that “Adventure is a state of mind.”

Darkness lends itself to microadventures. Walking or running a wellknown trail at night, climbing an otherwise easy route after dark, ascending peaks under moonlight, or canyoning under star-like displays of glow worms— all these things, simply by switching them from day to night, change our perspective and introduce a fresh level of adventurousness. But there are, of course, many, many ways we can introduce novelty to any local adventure: switching up or reversing routes; researching new local possibilities; altering your mode of travel; running rather than walking; walking rather than running; combining paddling with cycling; taking that path or turnoff you’ve gone past countless times but have never been down; going solo; going with new partners; wandering—deliberately— off-course; going fast; going slow; taking risks, but hopefully not outrageous ones. The list of ways to mix things up goes on.

In short, do this: Banish staleness.

Because here’s the thing: Humans, largely, crave ritual and regularity. But being the perverse species that we are, we—contradictorily—crave novelty too. The dopamine hits that accompany new experiences have shaped human evolution and engendered our drive for curiosity; adventure, especially local adventure close to home, is a relatively guilt-free method to satiate that desire for novelty, as opposed to, say, the unbridled and planet-wrecking consumption of needless new products. It’s not just that adventure makes us happier; it’s that new adventures make us happier, too. And those new adventures can be found closer than you think. Just don’t be so stupid as to ride bikes at night without lights.

JAMES MCCORMACK