"Steady Eddy says that deep down inside we're all afraid of the dark," contributing editor George Vukelich writes in his North Country Notebook column, addressing a recent Chicago power outage that left 40,000 customers in the dark and ignited a looting rampage. The column quotes Steady Eddy at length: "You sit in a boat up north in teetotal darkness fishing for walleyes, and everything is by feel and touch because you can't see diddly.... On an overcast night with no moon and no stars, it's like being inside a whale. But it's not scary because that dark doesn't seem dangerous to you [because] there are no people out there, no humans out there, except for your good companion up in the bow of the boat from whom there is nothing to fear, except a fart on occasion.... People, human beings, are what make the darkness dangerous. I mean, there is only one animal that's going to ransack a store...."
What makes the dark dangerous
From the Isthmus archives, Aug. 3, 1990