Waking Up to the Dark : A nocturnal course meanders through fog-dampened streets under the warm glow of street lamps to discover the soul of a slumbering populace.

Enter the night. The province of possums, bats, night-shift workers and insomniacs among us.

Or those who simply wish to be alive, rather than unconscious, on the other side of day: in darkness, in quiet, in peace, in defiance of structure and congestion and heat and traffic and checkout lines and TV noise and drive-time radio and lunchtime voices that announce, “No. 22, you’re order is ready.”

Thanks, we’ll pass.

It’s not a loner thing. No, it’s an aesthetic thing.

The night, in black opposition to every shining thing that defines us during the day, mirrors our lives in haunting, vacant relief. Truth is, it can be quite beautiful.

Moving about in the night offers a new look at the everyday: the jammed junction, in Ventura, of South Mills Road and Main Street, carless and awash in warm street-lamp glow cut by the strobing red light overhead. The 24-hour supermarket whose produce section, torn asunder by hundreds through the day, becomes a Robert Graves installation of shining pyramids of apples, oranges and lemons. The view over Simi Valley, at noon opaque and hot and roaring with Taco Bell, Nissan and HomeBase traffic but at midnight a twinkling New England village nestled between mountain ranges.

Still, within these contrasts, buried within the distance between the waking day and sleeping night, there’s an urge to find the fellow traveler. The measure of a place is taken in its soul, after all, and the ineffability of a soul cannot be known without seeing in both light and in darkness how life roots itself.

Our cities are small, however, like towns. And the spaces separating them are large--often “empty” but for lush fields of green vegetables and yellow flowers and looming brown, serrated, cracked sulfurous mountains.

No matter. We sought, from 8 p.m. on a Wednesday to 5 a.m. on a Thursday, all signs of life at night in Ventura County: worker, drifter, reveler, misfit, poet, prophet.

Our course would be random, helter skelter, the only true itinerancy of the night. We drove, we stopped, we listened; we ate, gabbed, drove, climbed, walked, drove, and drove: 165 miles, from Thousand Oaks to Oxnard to Moorpark to Simi Valley to Newbury Park to Camarillo to Oxnard (again) to Ventura. However it would turn out, a piece of Ventura County’s soul--rural not urban; suburban not urbane; rustic not polished--would happily be revealed.

Herewith our nine-hour chronicle.

*

8 P.M.

The Terrace Caffe, Thousand Oaks.

Restaurants are closing earlier and earlier during the week--most by 9 p.m. This one, a bright new bistro seeking to impress, held out the most promise for a lively room and the chance to dine relatively late.

It delivered, though by 9:30 the room was quickly emptying, and servers were preparing tables for the next day’s trade. In the span of 30 minutes, the place went from festive to moribund. It’s never fun to be the last one out. This reinforced our opinion that if you want to dine fashionably late in Ventura County--say, 10 p.m.--your venues are few and without fashion: Denny’s, Marie Callender’s, Jack in the Box.

*

9:40 P.M.

Panda’s at Holiday Inn, Thousand Oaks.

Two middle-aged women at the bar are reordering greyhounds (don’t ask). Two middle-aged men are seated beneath a TV blaring “Murphy Brown”; they drink martinis from a near-empty pitcher. The men are loudly discussing auto sales. One outlines the apparent calculus of locating a dealership: “You gotta know where you’re at. You gotta know where the people are coming from. If you don’t, you don’t know where you’re at. I’m telling you, it’s locale, locale, locale.” Good night.

*

10:10 P.M.

Wagon Wheel Bowling, Oxnard.

The Wagon Wheel is happily trapped in a time warp. Don’t let the red neon sign BOW (the LING part of the word on the south-facing sign is out) fool you: The facility is well-maintained, if out of the homespun 1950s. Check the cafe, which boasts a fading sign: “Home cooking like mother use to do before she took up soap operas and cigarettes.”

Actually, the home cooking tonight is Japanese, by the hand of cafe proprietor Fumiko Harada, who fed sweet and sour pork over rice ($5.50 per portion) to 45 bowlers in the Nishei league, organized by second-generation Japanese Americans. At this hour the bowlers, fortified by Harada’s cuisine, jam the center alleys in royal blue shirts bearing the logos Harry’s Landscape, Players Club, Sumitomo Bank, Westlake Dental, Hartman Handyman. They’ll spare and strike their way till midnight or so.

The best place to watch, however, is from within the Wagon Wheel’s bar, a red-boothed installation beneath a wagon wheel topped by eight red globes. For better or worse, you will feel very far away from it all in this glowing red emporium that looks ready to receive 80, yet serves only two patrons, seated apart.

But keep it on the early side. The Wagon Wheel was for years one of the few 24-hour outposts to turn to. Sadly, it closes at 1 a.m.

*

11:45 P.M.

Harley’s Simi Bowl, Simi Valley.

Strike--out. Thought we’d have time to bowl a string. Too bad. Closing time is in 15 minutes; they’re sweeping the alleys clear.

Desperate, we turn to the one outpost whose namesake holds promise, albeit darkly.

*

12 Midnight

The Vampyre Lounge Cafe, Simi Valley.

Nestled in a strip mall alongside Domino’s pizza (closed), the Vampyre not only has people within it but seated on the sidewalk outside it. Alcohol-free and designed as a coffeehouse for the young, the Vampyre clearly fills a niche. Forty-two souls from their teens to perhaps mid-20s sit on sofas, huddle around cafe tables sipping espressos, and otherwise strut and pose and tease and cajole.

The music is eastern-tinged, modern industrial rock, trance-like in its modal repetitions; the lighting ample, the espresso excellent. Scene: Two boys tickle a girl on the small makeshift stage, from which poetry gets read; they roll apart in paroxysms of laughter. A guy in pea coat, with Brylcreemed black hair and heavy eye shadow, calls out a reprimand in a bogus English accent. Another young fellow, seated at a tiny round table, urgently tells a young girl: “Nothing would want to make me stop living.” To which she replies, in earnestness and football metaphor: “Look, your ego took a real body block.”

Say what you want about kids with multiple earrings through multiple body parts and about places in which wall art includes Father-Knows-Best-like 1950s images manipulated so that penises grow from ears. This place is alive.

More importantly, of course, these young people--call them East County’s boulevardiers--are not going to bed. They are staying up in the night, inventing and reinventing their worlds. They will be here till 3 or 3:30 a.m., just as they are every night, in heady contrast to the shuttered citizenry surrounding them.

*

12:30 A.M.

Splash, at The Radisson Hotel, Simi Valley.

Hurrying here from the Vampyre in an effort to find throbbing nightclub action took us past Donut Queen (open), Donut Cafe (open), Taco Bell (open), Kinko’s (open and bustling with seven people), as well as a five-block sample of Simi Valley’s daytime “downtown”: Conroy’s Flowers, Acapulco, Shell Food Mart (open), Pet Food Warehouse, Burger King, Family Fun Zone, Blockbuster video, Shakey’s, Pretzels & Cheese, Simi Valley Lawnmower, Fast Frame, Tire City, Sizzler, Schmidt Overhead Doors, Larwin Liquor, Remax, Bank of America, Cheers/The Main Event, HomeBase, McDonald’s, Granada Oak Furniture Warehouse, Tire Man, Baby Treasures, Carpet Coop, Jiffy Lube, Wienerschnitzel, Urgent Care, 3-Day Blinds, Vitamin Station, Party for Less, Nissan, Goodyear, Honda, Acura, Toyota, Express Lube, Plymouth, Dodge/Eagle, Ford, Chevrolet and Kountry Folks.

Splash is closed. The pink psychedelic hearse parked outside promised intrigue, and the sign in the door said closed Sunday and Monday, but on this Wednesday, no luck. A peek inside shows Caribbean or Fijian translocation: bamboo tiki bar, frescoed mermaids, signs boasting the island life and lots of rum, rum, rum, fun, fun, fun. But when, when, when?

Then, as quickly as we turned away in deflation, the huge clear sky held out its own cosmic OPEN sign.

The Radisson is situated on a bluff overlooking Simi Valley. We approached the bluff on foot. What had been an unrelenting maze of block-after-block fluorescent in the valley below was now a charming twinkle in the blackness. Mountain ranges across the valley stood in dark relief against a galaxy smear. A shooting star from high above suddenly streaked downward and leftward, a great white slash across the sky, fading milliseconds before reaching the darkened ridge.

Time collapsed. Silence overwhelmed. And a piece of this night’s soul was revealed.

Simi Valley may have rolled up its streets by 9 p.m., but this place was now perfect, now beautiful. That the full-tilt Vampyre was somewhere down there, a true light among all the overheads, only added to the glow.

*

12:50 A.M.

Moorpark Freeway South, north of Olsen Road.

At 60 m.p.h., the car is engulfed in a scent tent of eucalyptus. Menthol and peppermint everywhere. As the 23 climbs and falls through gentle hills that are sun-scorched in the day, nature breathes at night in a way that casts it as a character, another player in the soul of the place, another form of night company. Roll those windows down. We’re Oxnard-bound.

*

1:10 A.M.

Ventura Freeway north, descending the Conejo Grade.

West County, East County. If the grade is a topological divider of sorts, so is the ocean’s influence. Weather, in the form of marine inversion layer--fog so thick it roils like smoke--has engulfed the Oxnard Plain below, occluding from view Oxnard and Ventura. It appears that a black ocean has moved inward and made its beach at the yellow lights of the 101 in Camarillo. Shooting stars up here, milk-bottle visibility down there. Here we go.

*

1:37 A.M.

El Bohemio Cafe, La Colonia, Oxnard.

Downtown is shut. But Foster’s Donuts at Oxnard Boulevard and 1st Street is open, without customers, as is the nearby Mobil Mart, where a one-legged man vacuums out his van.

But El Bohemio Cafe, at the corner of Hayes Avenue and Cooper Road, throbs. Boys, apparently in their teens, hang outside, as do elderly men; some hold bottles of beer. Two dressed-to-the-nines men in their 20s escort a young woman from their car into the bar. And music pours onto the street.

It all looks so inviting and festive, but then this isn’t the tour boat debarking in Cozumel. This corner is said to be the center of Oxnard’s drug traffic.

When some stares our way start to miss that friendly look, we decide it’s time to move on, regretfully.

*

2 A.M

Wal-Mart, Oxnard.

Suspend, for a moment, all arguments about what Sam Walton hath truly wrought in his mega-chain that threatens the mom-and-pop shop. This 24-hour store rearranges sensibility.

A salesman spots me, somewhat agog, in chain saws. “We’re still waiting to receive those Homelites you’re looking at, sir,” he says. “Is there something else I can help you with?”

A giant blue floor waxer, followed by a man who steers it, whirs by; together they’re an ice-rink Zamboni for speckled tile floors. We step aside.

We browse. Nearby is the mountain of jellies. Then juices. Cosmetics. Toys. Then auto tires, camping gear, fishing lures, shoes, power tools, White Stag parkas. We stop in Garden, pick up some grass seed for those shady spots, and finally see customers: a whole family looking over the gas barbecues.

Without warning, at 2:09 a.m., a voice fills the store, an intercommed incantation: “All right, Receiving, let’s go to lunch.” As unseen workers break bread in the middle of their work day and the middle of our night, we take leave.

Outside, the only people we see are young men in white breather-masks with power blowers, blowing gum wrappers and litter from the daylight throngs off endless cement walkways.

*

3 A.M.

Loop’s Restaurant, Montalvo.

Coffee break. Mounted high on the wall is a small TV. Infomercials prevail, and as we lace into a pressed-turkey sandwich, an off-screen voice asks a young man: “When was the last time you had Ovaltine?”

Once she’s served us, and we’ve paid up but linger over coffee, the waitress asks permission to go outside for a smoke. Soon we will leave, and as we back out of the lot, we see our waitress, sitting on a small chair in a quilted parka against the cold, alone in the headlights. She nods good night. It is the first time that things feel truly lonely.

*

3:41 A.M.

Grant Park, Ventura.

The fog has receded enough to see the city far below this magnificent promontory. Beneath a moonlit sky, Ventura is reduced to a seaside village of yellow street lights and a lamp-lighted pier extending into the black ocean. Three cars are parked up here: two, apparently, for romance, their occupants writhing about and steaming up windows; and a third, apparently, for a home. In the home on wheels, a beat-up old station wagon, a lone man sits upright in the passenger seat and watches all who approach; he is blocked from view, however, by cardboard that replaces the driver’s side window. Good night, sir: It’s time to leave well enough alone and head safely downhill.

*

3:55 A.M.

The Avenue (Ventura Avenue), Ventura.

Russell’s Donuts is open, a man hard at work at the fryer. The door is ajar, lights on inside, at the Hell’s Angels Ventura Chapter--but no one in sight. And signs of life percolate in modest senior housing along West Warner Street: No fewer than four sets of windows flicker in such a way that the only light on inside is that of a TV. Have the TVs been on all night, balm and drug to insomniacs? Or are these Ventura’s earliest of early birds? Are these the windows of the elderly ill, whose sleep is terminally disrupted? No matter. These people are in their own spaces.

*

4:15 A.M.

Ventura Pier, Ventura.

The pier deck is black and shiny from the wet fog, now lifted. Two young men fish. One hooks the pier, the other asks the time from a visitor and looks away without saying anything. At the end of the pier, it is dark, the ocean black, the sway of the structure jilting. But nothing can prepare the nighthawk for the installed sculpture “Wavespout,” which blows 10-foot jets of spray up into the darkness; the water vanishes, then reappears as it falls to the decking to the rhythm of whoosh, splat, whoosh, splat.

At the site of the sculpture a big hole has been cut into the pier. Down below, bright street lights mounted to the girders illuminate not only the sculpture’s hydraulic workings but eerily light the mussel-encrusted pilings, swaying in a dense, ominous pea-green ocean chop. There is something both beautiful and hideous here. Both in and out of the natural order of things, “Wavespout” is perhaps Ventura County’s most exotic sight, if not soulful company, in the middle of the night. If it’s no Chrysler Building, it is a beacon to the place, and there is comfort, as well as soul, in that.

*

5 A.M

Home.

A bed appears. Whoosh, splat.