It wasn't about that one light!

How an anecdote led to a sleepless night

Peeps do not like excess light!

by Tom Ferrio

During the Town Council hearing on the proposed lighting ordinance, I decided to speak to add emphasis to two points. I didn't have any prepared words and I improvised my way through it.

After I sat down I thought "that was a disaster, I shouldn't have tried to inject some humor without preparation." The reaction of the Council confirmed that, to me.

Read past the break for the details.


I felt that I had two points to make that, perhaps, had not been received clearly by the Council, Planning Commission, and public at the meeting.

1. that we were simultaneously being told that this ordinance is absolutely essential to protect our dark skies while being assured not to worry as it would have no effect on our behavior, and
2. that our elected Leaders are insisting on using legislation to "solve" this problem when much more positive approaches are possible and would likely work better.

So, without knowing from one sentence to the next what I was going to say, I stood up and told a story that you can watch here. I watched this, with some trepidation, when I spent Saturday compiling video links for the Town Council meeting. If I may say so myself, it doesn't seem to be as bad as I thought it was at the time.

But my point seemed to be completely missed when valuable meeting time was spent giving me advice on how I could "solve my problem," as you can watch here. I guess my little talk was an Epic Fail if they didn't understand I was just using that "100,000-watt light" to illustrate my point! Or maybe it was just Dan Slattery who felt the need to give me assistance and the others went along meekly. I don't know.

As somewhat of an aside, I felt it was a nice illustration of the saying "give a boy a hammer and everything is a nail" that Town lawyer Peter Ruggiero suggested I could bring a private lawsuit about the light. At that point I started crawling under my chair. I have never been a party in a lawsuit and, though I sense it may be an unattainable goal in Charlestown, I never want to be one.

Another intriguing aside is wonderment at how many solutions to my "problem" might be possible under existing laws and how the Dark Skies ordinance would not add any additional solutions until the light fixture ages beyond repair.

I let this experience slowly fade from my brain cells until the middle of the night a few days later.

One of our aging dogs can't see well but still insists on trying to patrol the house in the middle of the night. I awoke to somewhat louder crashing into walls and furniture than normal and I opened my eyes to see ... darkness. In my groggy state, I wondered how both the dog and I had slept so soundly for it to be past 4:12 a.m. when all goes dark for a while. Then I woke up enough to realize it was only 1 a.m. "Oops," I said, and a chill went down my back. Had my neighbor heard about my speech at the Council meeting? If so, I expect he felt offended, a side effect I didn't anticipate from my little speech.

I got the dog settled but then I couldn't get to sleep. First I was writing this blog article in my mind ... over and over. Then I was trying to find the best words for apologizing to my neighbor for "outing" him as an enemy of dark skies in such a public manner.

About two hours of tossing and turning later, I got up to get a drink of water. When I went out to the kitchen I saw ... that the darkness was an illusion caused by the fog. The bright glow was still there but was diffused because of the fog and wasn't casting shadows inside the house. So I wasn't in trouble with my neighbor and I could at least think about getting a little more sleep.

And that's when the other dog decided that the chewy treat before bedtime didn't agree with his digestive system...

Thanks for reading about my nighttime adventure. In a few days I plan to explain my two points in more detail in an If I Was King of Dark Skies article. Will wrote one here with his ideas.