'Bred Crumbs

(What follows is a true account of something that – shhh – never happened.)

It is a half-hour into 2003, in the middle of a nowhere bounded by garlicky Gilroy and Harley-loving Hollister. The hills roll gently before piling up into lines of short mountains on the horizon. City lights are too far away to obscure the night. The rains have stopped, but dampness lingers.

Thirty of us dribble out of the farmhouse, cloaked in caps and scarves and hushed murmuring.

Our path winds around the old house, along the trees past the chicken coops to the bald green hills beyond. Our leader reminds us repeatedly of the extreme need for quiet out here where sound roams wild; if the land owner finds out what we're up to, we're "really busted." The stated direness makes me revert to my old self for a moment, thinking that if this lark is really this risky, maybe we should skip it and go back to the house. But only forty-five minutes earlier, I had written, on a slip of the blue paper we used for things we wanted to leave behind in 2002, worrying, and sentenced it along with everyone else's outgoing albatrosses to be fed in batches to the New Year's fire. (One fellow ritualist had insisted we should put in the banished evils one by one, so they would "die alone and afraid," but time did not allow.) So I shake my feeble dread, remembering the inviting thrill of this small exploit. What is about to happen wouldn't be memorable to many, but to someone who had long preferred the safety of a shell to doing, oh, anything, it's a treat. Besides, it probably isn't as perilous as all that; exaggeration is a valuable tool when one is trying to herd cats across a cattle ranch.

Flashlights point out the puddles along the gravel path, but it's still not long before the cool of wet sock touches my feet. I had no shoes suitable for this outing, so instead I am finishing off my twenty-buck Payless sneakers, which are thoroughly cracking at the soles after a surprisingly long run, and I have thick dry socks waiting inside. Worrying was relegated to the pyre, but the resourcefulness gradually replacing it was not.

Too often, voices rise, followed by shushing and repeated reminders that this is supposed to be a stealth mission. Later, some of those who couldn't shut up will congratulate themselves on the relative quiet of thirty mostly drunk people, but please. The rudeness of your persistent loudness is a symptom of you, not the alcohol. A little teamwork here, huh?

I'm surprised and a little disappointed at how drunk I'm not. Not so long ago, I could get a strong buzz off one beer. Now I'm feeling no real artificial happy, despite having had one beer, one tea-flavored malt beverage, one big rum and coke, and three Jell-O shots. Maybe it will hit later, when the last lump of orange-encased vodka has finally gone off in my stomach. Even so, I wish I had written my former susceptibility to alcohol on one of the yellow pieces of fire fodder for things we wanted to invite into our lives in the new year. (Or, I could lose the extra twenty pounds I'm carrying around lately.)

We break from the path, across the cow pasture. Now the flashlights scan not for puddles but for cowpies. It's been long enough since I've been on a farm that the nature of the hazards surprises me: not piles of enlarged dog turds, but big, single, circular lumps, easy enough to avoid even though my eyes keep straying from the ground. The sky is teeming with stars, and I just want to stare. I can find landmarks obvious and obscure: the hunter, the dog, the rabbit, the river, the queen, various dippers. In the city, it's too bright to spot the bull, so to speak; out here, the vast population of lights obscures its outline, but the cluster of seven tiny sisters jumps out and mark the beast's shoulder. The Milky Way meanders faintly across one edge of the sky. Some of us see a shooting star, and pointlessly call out the sighting; as someone teasingly chides us, once it's announced, it's too late to see it. Forget our mission's goal; I could stand here for hours and just watch the sky. I wonder, for a moment, if my love of the unobscured firmament contradicts my choice of urban living, but I know it doesn't; the stars and the pretty hills aside, I just could not live this far from everything.

We crest the hill that puts the owner's house well out of sight, and we begin. The illicit fireworks are less grand than I imagined. Growing up a timid child in a different fireworks-forbidding state, I never experienced storebought boomers, and they don't amount to much here, perhaps weakened by the wet grass. The greatest source of merriment in this covert celebration winds up being the sparklers. I loved these as a kid, and for me and the rest, the simple joy comes back now – setting the stick alight, marveling at the benign sparks, etching brightly colored trails into the black. The not-entirely-effective embargo on chatter is forgotten, but a subdued reverence keeps voices low. The hills spill on forever, and we dance and laugh in the peaceful heart of them.

So the new year begins with a promising event: a small adventure, its risks examined and weighed then absorbed, and its rewards appreciated perhaps out of proportion to their magnitude. Or perhaps exactly right. Never mind resolutions; let us mark well this snapshot, this night, this daring to revel in small but powerful lights against the darkness.