The End of Night On this pre-dawn November morning, not even the moon shines through the cloud-dense sky. Yet it’s not quite dark. Patches of the trail are lit by streetlamps, and even where it’s not, the ambient light makes puddles shimmer, and the path is, if not clear, at least visible. In the city, we never experience true dark. At least not when we’re outside. Some twenty-five years ago, in Port Townsend, I stared in wonder at a brilliant sky lit up with a carpet of stars, for I hadn’t seen such a thing since childhood. In Portland, where I lived, the skies had long been dimmed by the…