Darkness is a Friend
Man – everything is digital these days, even The Old Farmer’s Almanac. I had no idea until I Googled “how long does it take for human eyes to adjust to dark.”
Among my options to click on was a January 10, 2020, article on www.almanac.com by Bob Berman titled, How Human Eyes Adapt to Light and Color.
According to Berman’s article, “It takes 20 to 45 minutes for your eyes to adapt to night sky conditions. When dark adapted, you can see only in black and white.
If light hits your face, the dyes in your eyes “bleach” and then have to recover their dark-adapted vision.
That’s why astronomers get annoyed when someone carelessly shines a white light in their eyes.” Hmm. Good info.
You know who else gets annoyed when a white light is carelessly shined in their eyes? Game wardens! Why? Because game wardens try to maintain “dark adapted” mode as much as possible when working at night. It’s a big part of our “man, that game warden came out of nowhere” success.
I don’t know how many miles I’ve driven a patrol vehicle around the highways and byways of this state without any lights on, but it’s a considerable number.
Game warden patrol vehicles come with cut-off switches that allow us to turn off the headlights, taillights, brake lights and just about any other lights on the vehicle except the ones on the dashboard.
Blacking out the dashboard lights is critical if you want to stay dark adapted and see where you’re going at night.
I mean, it’s not that critical if you’re following taillights 100 yards away on a desolate dirt road, but if you’re tooling around and all of a sudden there is an amorous young couple parked in the middle of said road, it’s pretty danged critical.
I don’t know of any instances where lovestruck parkers have actually been run over, but I know of several instances where game wardens have run into ditches, plowed through gates and even bumped into other game warden vehicles a time or two.
There were different methods utilized to take care of those pesky dashboard lights back when. The easy way was to just throw a jacket up over the steering wheel and stuff it around as best you could to cover them up. Then, there were some game wardens that would get a little fancier and attach what amounted to little black curtains along the top edge of the dashboard that they could drop down when it was time to go into stealth mode.
Still others would go the arts and crafts route with custom cut-outs of black plastic or cardboard that affixed to strategically placed strips of Velcro like so many pieces of a puzzle to completely extinguish any and all light emitting from the dash.
When things got too dark to see the road, we had a dim little running light we could flip on to help navigate when all the other lights were off.
Back in the day, we had to outfit our own, and your status as a game warden was sometimes judged by how well it worked.
Mine was just a license plate light I bought at a hardware store and mounted to the bottom of my patrol car’s bumper on the driver’s side.
Other, more tacti-cool, game wardens had elaborate set-ups that had some obscure tractor light stuffed into a pipe and mounted at just the right angle that pretty much made them invisible.
Yeah, we used to go to great lengths to catch people out at night doing that which they ought not do according to the Parks and Wildlife Code.
I’m sure today’s game wardens do the same, just with different methods maybe. But for game wardens, then and now, one thing hasn’t changed; darkness is a friend.
