Fly by night -- and crawl, slither, hop and gallop too

Against the night sky, a herd of giraffes unfurls, like a ribbon of paper dolls pulled taut. The dim light erases the telltale tawny spots, turning each figure into a black silhouette. Legs long, necks long, the animals bob as they run, so like birds about to take flight you strain to hear the sound of wings. Then they stop and disappear into stillness.

Somewhere far above your head, giraffes blink and breathe and blot out the stars. Music throbs in the undergrowth, children laugh behind you, and not so far away a lion roars. The hot summer day has been pushed flat and cool, midnight approaches and flowers bloom nearby in the dark; their smell is purple and sweet. You could be in a fever dream, or a story told under mosquito netting somewhere out on the savanna. Except for empty trams that pass you by. And the far-off glow of the gift shop. And the nice people who eventually tell you it’s time to leave because it’s closing time at the San Diego Zoo.

Billboards all over Southern California advertise the “night zoo,” making it sound like something conjured up by Maurice Sendak. Which it is. Dimly lighted paths run through trees, through underbrush. The Sun Bear is in there somewhere, with his adorable toy face and nasty sharp claws; perhaps you’ll see him this time. A mountain goat, a camel, a cluster of tamarins emerge from the dark, eyes first, like the Cheshire cat materializing around his smile and in the pale blue glow of their water tank, the hippos silently dance on their tippy toes. Two lionesses roar a duet at each other and their shadows, then play with a bowling ball as if it were a bit of yarn. The moon bleaches the chain-link wall of their cage invisible and the depth of their voices, the size of their paws seem impossibly huge and near.

The idea of the night zoo began 10 years ago as a few special weekends in the summer. This year the zoo stays open until 10 every evening (guests can enter the zoo until 9 p.m.) from June 22 through Sept. 1. The night zoo is so popular, it now has its own set of educational and entertainment programs.

But the biggest draw remains the transformation of the dark. The landscape is somehow reversed, a semi-familiar landscape where even the trash cans look like something else for a minute or so. Is that a rock or a warthog? A wall or a camel? In the dark, the zoo is another zoo, an altered state of perception, drug-free. And it’s not just the zoo that tempts us on a July night. In the summer, we rush into the darkness we often avoid at other times of the year. In the summer, we walk familiar streets turned inside out with night seeking relief, and romance, and adventure.

A friend who has traveled much said once that you don’t know a place until you figure out what the rules are in the dark. Where you can go, where other people go, where it is safe to walk alone, where it is not.

Night in any city conjures up its own society and its own geography. In Los Angeles, where we have a fairly monogamous relationship with the sun, many of us distrust the dark. Indistinct shapes and free-floating sounds unmoor us -- the sound of a car door closing, of footsteps on concrete, a sudden laugh -- can seem menacing on a nighttime sidewalk, or coming from the corners of a night-quiet schoolyard. Places that by day are busy and loud fall silent, shadow replaces color and movement, and the unblinking gaze of headlights are far less human than the outlines of a car.

The moonlight bleaches many fences, many boundaries, invisible. Things happen in the dark that might not in the light, we tell our secrets, bare our passions, and not all of them are safe. Women still march to Take Back the Night, and in times of war and conflict, there are curfews for good reason.

But in the summer, much of our fear dissolves with the heat. The night smaller, seems safer, or maybe we feel wilder. Bare-armed and sockless, we live closer to the nakedness of Eden and the dark beckons us, a canopy of endless shade after heat-swooning afternoons, a place where the perpetual inexplicable thrill of summer lingers even for those long past summer-camp and beach-baked days. There are no lightning bugs, which is a shame, but at least you can breathe.

In the summer, city people walk in the dark -- along Santa Monica’s palisades and the La Crescenta hills, pacing the still-warm sidewalks of Koreatown and the coke-jumpy lights of the Strip. Hand-holding couples; pajamaed children, damp from baths or that last dip in the pool; power-walking girlfriends, ankles and wrists shackled by weights; men in tank tops and college shorts with their dogs all throw shadows beneath streetlights or the pale high moon. In backyards and schoolyards, kids shoot hoops until way past midnight, then slice down the street on bikes and Rollerblades. The beach playgrounds are as busy at 10 p.m. as at 10 a.m. and no worries about sunscreen.

In the parks and the canyons, hikers watch for the shine of yellow eyes or the sound of a stealthy paw, grip their water bottles and shiver in delight -- where else can you wander the wilderness at night and an hour later sip a Manhattan at Vermont.

In other cities, other climates, humidity lingers long after the sun has gone and there is little solace in the dark. A hot summer’s night is literary shorthand for disaster; something -- lust or violence or the bottomless rage of Tennessee Williams -- is about to boil over. Here, at least, we can usually rely on a quieter, cooler dark, illuminated only by the frisson of danger or the feel of our own bodies moving in an altered state. Or the thought of giraffes flying and hippos dancing somewhere in the shared darkness.