Night Lights

I’m riding a crowded shuttle bus from the airport into Victoria. It’s dark and I zone out, knowing my place down by the water will be one of the last stops. Down the highway, into town, back and forth from hotel to hotel, the world is a blinking, bouncing sideshow. All smiles, the driver jumps at every stop to help with the bags.

Beep-beep-beep the van reports when he throws it in R to back out. Back down the way we came, then this way, that, crisscrossing downtown. Neon, street lamps, traffic lights. Bags bustled out the door. Travelers stepping down, closing in on their destinations, relieved. A dozen stops later we pull out of James Bay at the waterfront. Just two of us passengers left now. The driver opens it up and we whisk along a deserted Dallas Road. Behind low dark clustered bushes the waters of the straight glitter under a big moon. Everything is simplified, like a black-and-white photo, all silvery moonlit water.

Instantly, I am thinking this ride is not so bad. Across the waters, at a poetic distance, the lights of Port Angeles dot the border marking where water meets the Olympic mountains.

Who you are as a writer is all about what you notice, what pulls you to attention. As we breeze along the waterfront, my senses are in Record mode. Other writers would have been recording and playing with the quiet murmurings of conversation earlier on the shuttle, the jostle of busy intersections, the dramas of fidelity and infidelity playing out in the hotels.

What is of interest in this world? Every writer has a different answer.