I went for a cuppa tea last night at the home of Sargeant Bay residents Kevin and Joan Dowdall. I arrived after dark and could see only the pine needle strewn trail ahead of my headlights. Everything else was immersed in the shadows of the forest.
Then I could see what became illuminated by Kevin's flashlight as he opened the gate for me to drive through and the distorted look of his face in half-light as we shook hands.
Then timed motion lights fired off in sequence as I made my way from the car to the house. A guesthouse sprang to life, glimpses of gardens that must be beautiful in summer, the familial knick knacks in the front bed by the walkway. As we spoke over tea and biscuits, my gaze was ever drawn to the dancing embers in the fireplace.
That is where this cozy story ends. Kevin took me out on the deck. I couldn't see a thing until my eyes adjusted and then I looked up and across the shadowscape of beautiful Sargeant Bay into the piercing, painful, orange, sun-spoked light mounted on a pole at a neighbour's house.
It isn't that it appears as a large light from across the bay, but it is a glaring orb with beams radiating out from it that is actually making me wince as I type this. There were other lights on in homes across the bay, but they were welcoming and soft and, at some point, all of them would be extinguished as people went to bed. But Kevin said the orange orb stays on all night, every night.
The Dowdalls and several neighbours are trying to encourage the neighbours with the offending light to switch the bulb, take it out and put in motion censored lights or aim the thing at the ground rather than straight across the bay. They have been met with outright refusal to date.Kevin took a letter with the names of 11 residents affected by the light to the District of Sechelt to see if they could help, but corporate officer Jo-Anne Frank said they have no authority over lighting in residential areas.
With a quick phone call to Coun. LeeAnn Johnson for the Town of Gibsons, I discovered they have a dark sky policy in place and are moving swiftly toward changing the lighting in the Town so it no longer pollutes the night sky.
"The intrusion of light into your house at night is annoying," Johnson said. "The purpose of light for safety is at street level, not the sky."The web site www.darksky.org talks in depth about how lighting up our night sky is harmful to the behaviour of fish and wildlife, the rhythms of plants and trees and human behaviour. It affects stargazing and scientific study of the night sky, decreases security by causing shadow effects for criminals to hide in and wastes energy.
There are several options now for less wasteful and more appropriate lighting that can still provide people with safety and infringe a little less on the natural world - which includes us humans.
I have lived most of my life in cities and towns lit up like Roman candles at night and will admit that since moving to the Coast, the darkness makes me nervous. It feels bizarre to walk along my residential street in pitch blackness. I've seen more bears here than in all of my years guiding canoe trips in the north.
I am a woman. And while I have the right to walk safely at night, it doesn't feel that way always. So, I can understand a need for lighting that protects us, that illuminates the things that go bump in the night. But the orange orb I observed last night is unnecessary and outrageous when healthier alternatives exist.
