In order to explore properly, I had to determine when deepest, darkest night was.

I checked the sunset/sunrise times for my physical location - sunset was at 7:44pm, sunrise at 7:31am. Directly between those two points was 1:37:30am, the point at which the sun was furthest from either rising or setting, my own private aphelion.

I wanted to start around 1:37, and go from there. I knew I wouldn't make it to dawn - I was already tired when I started, for a number of reasons - but I liked the idea of journeying toward morning.

A map for you (the pink areas are those I consider my stomping grounds/neighborhood). I didn't number every picture, because some of them cluster so thickly you wouldn't be able to read them along the travel line on the map. So I just numbered every couple of them, to give a sense of pacing:



I started off about fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, because I knew exactly where I wanted to start in my neighborhood: the power plant. Half the city's under construction right now - people are building up toward the sky, so there's digging equipment and torn up lots everywhere. There are plans to renovate the power plant, but right now it's just sitting there, empty and eerie in the night, surrounded by a bunch of industrial-looking electric conductor things.

There's a massive telephone pole outside of it that I started with. I loved that it was so tall the spokes at the top half-disappeared into the night. It would take three of me to wrap my arms around it:



Then it was time. In this abandoned and windy place, with the whole planet between me and the sun, I took this picture (1):



Then I began to walk. For those of you who are skimmers, my neighborhood is predominated by construction, cats, storefronts and lights. Either that, or that's just what I tend to document most between the hours of 1:32am and 3:53am. If you want to see those things, keep reading.

I went by the power station, which I have already lovingly over-photographed numerous times because, whether it's day or night, it is always awesome.



Then I saw my first cat. None of them stayed put long enough for long exposures, so I did my best to get their eyes to catch the flash so you could see them:



And it turns out that later editing in Photoshop does wonders, if not for making a pretty picture, at least for better cat documentation:



A train came by, and the cat ran.

The track runs right by the power plant, and is used primarily by tremendously long freight trains and the occasional tiny Amtrack. This part of the track bends into a westward heading, so rather than a roar the sound of passing trains is that of wheels screaming against the rails, a high metal shriek that shakes your eardrums.

It's impossible to photograph. It howls by too fast for a long exposure, and even when I got close enough for the wind of its passage to toss my hair around the flash was pretty useless. This is the best shot I got (2):



Running up to see the train left me standing on the southern edge of some of the recent construction:



I freak out more easily at night (as do most, I suppose) - around the time I was taking the above picture, my backbrain became certain that while I had my face buried in the camera menus someone was going to come up and put a bag over my head. I would position the camera, get the long exposure started, quietly panic while trying to hold still so I didn't mess up the image, and strain to hear whether someone was sneaking up on me. The second the camera clicked to indicate the exposure was over I'd swing around and do a 360 scan of my environment.

I was still doing that when I took this picture of an art car. I liked that one of the polka dots was a clown (3):



Of course, later on in this exploration there was actual minor weirdness: two different guys walked by me tried to start conversations by calling me beautiful and asking me why I wasn't smiling at them, etc (I'll tell you where they happened when we get to that part). And between the above picture and the next is when another guy with a sign for an artist's market followed me for half a block, screaming. His reasoning was that women, the instant they were born, were smarter than men who had lived all their lives. He knew this because in his three lives as a man he had been Caesar, Abe Lincoln, and - then he got sidetracked before sharing the third - George W. Bush resembled some kind of wild animal that had climbed into his eye.

Through all that stuff I was fine - really attentive in case somebody decided to go for me, of course, but not skittish, because most of the time people who are saying or yelling random things to you at night on the sidewalk are not the ones who are actually going to do anything. But taking the picture of the construction and the art car? Certain I would be taken.

Thank you backbrain, for deciding to base my animal fight or flight response off episodes of Criminal Minds and CSI rather than reality. It's charming, and I'm sure you and I will totally survive to old age if we keep on this way.

Much like Team FOEcakes' completion of night photography (here), this looks like a picture out of a video game. But it's a real building, and this is a real picture.



Across the street was an empty lot - there are plans under way to build another massive condo building here, but for now it's fenced off and full of weeds (4):



I skirted the southern edge of this lot, and on my way found this little guy:



I'm not sure what his deal was, or even which way was rightside up for him, but he was cute. Just past the lot was a park I've often walked by in daylight. There's a sculpture in the southwest corner that I've always seen from a distance and wanted a better look at. I like public art. Even if it's weird or senseless, a pile of pylons of just some giant pyramid sitting there, I'm usually interested in it.

This one, however, was disappointing. Maybe it's just that I couldn't see it well in the dark, or because I'd spent so much time wondering about it that it could never measure up:



Just past it, more construction! This piece of equipment was sitting on a huge, flat, expanse of newly poured concrete. It looked like a giant museum display: Downtown, Soon This Will Come For You.



Still heading south. In the distance, as always, the glass tower:



It's funny how for most of this exploration, I didn't really feel like myself - I was removed from my normal habits and surroundings.

I leaned against a post to take this picture of the moon:



It's funny how much of your self seems caught up in your environment. I think I'm beginning to understand now why some people bolt again and again from relationships, jobs, family, never staying anywhere for longer than a couple of years.

We shape the places we live in. Our habits, possessions, and friends echo ourselves back at us. When we step outside of them, there's less to define us, to remind us of how others think of us, or of the choices we've made. I think people run in the hope that they'll leave themselves behind.

I've never been a runner, which brings its own problems. I tend to think of it as the more honorable route, but maybe the truth is that the same irrationality that drives the runners out in desperate attempts to become different people appears in me as a terror that if I leave a place I'll lose myself.

An ambulance shot by. I didn't have time to brace myself, so the picture shook (5):



I crossed the road the ambulance had just passed over, and headed to the walkway that would take me across the river.



There was a lot of graffiti on the bridge across the river. This piece was huge - I backed into the bridge railing and still couldn't fit it all into one photograph, so I took two and stitched them together later:



And this? I'm not sure I even want to know what the deal is with this (6):



Although oddly enough, this was more fascinating to me than the sculpture I'd finally gotten up close to, earlier in the park.

I got past the bridge and realized I was at the new Long Center. I love this building - it's all arcs and circles of archictecture spinning out from it, echoing and implying the amphitheatre within (7):



How even the parking garage is gridded, and will soon be grown over with ivy:



Of course, across from the place where the passion of the theatre blooms, there sits an entirely different kind of passion (8):



And then I saw this tiny car. I think they're the cutest things ever:



It was in the parking lot for this Whataburger. Look at all the people inside. I hope the owner of the car was in there with them, having a strawberry shake and a greasy burger and sharing fries with friends (9):



There's a massive school for the deaf here. I walked by it, but none of my photographs did it justice, so I did not include them:



It's big - about the size of a large high school - and they have their own track, and these big imposing buildings. I'm sad that they're close to downtown but that I've never seen anyone out and about. I realize it's effortful to go out into a world that isn't built for you and expects you to cleave to its own way of doing things or explain why you're not, and I know what a great relief it is to be in a place surrounded by friends where you don't have to make those mental adjustments. I wonder if that's the reason, or if I'm wrong and there's an entirely different cause.

This was a remarkably yellow house:



This is actually a nail salon in a house. There's a big thing in this city about wrapping things in Christmas lights. A lot of the trees' surfaces are mapped out with little points of color or white:



And this business had a gorgeous sapphire light. This is a fifteen second exposure here - I wanted it blue blue blue.



Downtown is seamed with creeks. They cross beneath the roads, and are usually dry. But it rained recently, so they're full of water now. I took this picture standing on a bridge, looking out through the brush to the light and the water (10):



This is the first of several shots of businesses. Some of them look abandoned when they're empty - their lights off, cold and dark. But some just look like they're waiting, soon to be filled by people and noise again.



Another cat! I knelt down and made little encouraging noises and the cat came this close to me, which was pretty close (not only does the camera add five pounds, it also apparently adds five feet). Then she crouched down and we looked at each other for a bit until I lifted the camera, the flash went off, and she bolted.



And she had a friend! I like that the eyeflashes are different sizes in this image, because his head was turned:



The wonders of photo editing once more bring our subject into view:



Why do these people have a hitching post outside their house? Has it ever been used? I would so hitch a car to this thing (11).



Right after the hitching post house was a little drug store.

After that was a little store with the employees sitting out in the parking lot, talking.

I like how the night changes things. It feels confessional. I don't know if that's because of the darkness - whether we feel that we are hidden, that the spotlight isn't on our faults. Whether seeing the places we know so well by daylight made alien and altered by midnight reminds us in some unconscious way of how changeable everything is, how easy it is to lose things. Or whether we're just tired from holding something in all day, and our ability to repress our guilt or concern is simply at its weakest.

I passed several people talking on this walk, and it was never about shallow topics. Always family, leaving home, someone they loved who might not love them back.



I wish this picture had come out better. There was a wire mesh over the light bulb, and it was just the kind of institutional view that seemed like it should have all the life sucked out of it. But something about the light managed to make it warm and homey, even though the bulb was caged and behind bars.



Then there was a tchochke store! I'm sure in the daylight it looks much cleaner and more inviting, but now it totally looks like one of those places that would get you sucked into an alternate dimension:



Remember that little tree of light from further up? Here's its big sister (12):



I think this is my favorite picture out of all the ones I took. Or rather, my favorite place out of all the ones I photographed. In the daylight the lanterns probably look festive, but at night they aren't well-lit. Our eyes are pretty good at picking up red, however, so as I walked up to it the first thing I saw were little ruby droplets scattered among the shadowy branches of the tree.



This garden was behind a wooden gate. I could barely fit the camera lens through one of the gaps - isn't it pretty? And all hidden where no one can see it, which is sad.



Empty midnight streeeeeeeeeeeet!



Someone was cleaning - I could hear it. But they weren't in evidence, so I just snapped a shot of their utility closet. Now I can backward-engineer all their cleaning secrets.



Then a bunch of empty storefronts - a diner, the dead at play, and a velvet elvis.



Hey! My friend from before was back! I'm still not sure which side of him should be rightside up.



This was the front wall for the school for the deaf. The wall was massive and wavy, and went on for about a block. Hm. Maybe the reason I don't see much of them is because they've built a secret headquarters for SFØ, and they won't need to come out until they've taken over the world.



Pedicab!



Someone else in this building was up just as late as I was:



This is another thing I like about the night - there's more freedom about it, even if you're working. Fewer people around means fewer people to get snitty about you doing your own thing. You can step outside, walk around your gas station a bit, breathe some air, and then go back inside and no one will have a problem with it.



That's my shadow. There was some kind of machinery echoing and grinding away behind this vent, but it sounded like the sea:



I came to the bat statue, spinning gently in the wind. I saw a lot of bats, but they were faster than the cats - like drunken sprinters on amphetamines, careening and tumbling through the air. I could never draw a bead on them (13).



Then I headed back across the river, taking a different bridge this time Another cat walked by at this point, but I was long-exposuring the shot and couldn't move before it was too late.



Still under construction? Yes, still under construction (14).



I like this shot, with the creepy clock and the huge crane (important later) and the glass tower.



So, yeah, that crane from the previous picture? Walking under it now, in this corridor. Do you see the plastic bag on the ground, at the very end of the tunnel?



I was walking blithely along, waiting for something photographable to catch my eye. I was a few steps past the plastic bag when I heard a rustle.

I turned around.

The bag had inched toward me a bit on the sidewalk. The wind caught at it again, and it slid a little closer to me. I had a brief, "Aw" American Beauty, bag in the wind, moment. I lifted my camera.

It rushed me!



And dude, it came after me the entire way out of tunnel! It followed me out onto the street! If I had been going slower, I think it would have kept up with me and I'd have a new pet.

Or it would have eaten me alive.

After my bare-knuckled escape, I decided to take a closeup shot of the tower. I know there's like, three or four pictures of it in here, but it's pretty at any angle.



And right next to it? This. I mean, what happened here? It looks like there should be museum tours and lifelike plastic sculptures of the people who lived here before the disaster struck (15).



It was between the above picture and the next one that I got a lot of attention from dudes who thought I was pretty and should smile more.

Hm. This praxis is bracketed by guys following me.



Anyway, these people were up late doing something. I always like watching people inside buildings. Or just standing on a bridge or a hill as all the traffic drives by. All those lives, with their own dreams and burdens and histories and lies and revelations.

And their tendency to look at me funny when I'm standing outside their place of business trying to take a long exposure photograph of them.

By then it was almost four. I put my camera away and walked home.