Dec 21, 2008 - 22:05:06 CST
Read fast. Today is the shortest day of the year. As I wrote this, a few days ago, the sun came up at 8:23 a.m. a huge bloody egg yoke disk in the southeast.Thanks to the appalling blanket of cold that currently envelops the Great Plains, the rising sun was as gigantic as it was impotent. Just as there is a wavering effect in the light near the horizon on extremely hot days, so too, in the bitterest days of winter, the air between you and the rising sun is so dense with trillions of microscopic ice crystals that it has a magnifying effect, a kind of ice pixelation of the sky.
Here's a paradox. At Rugby (or Rio) the sun is 93,000,000 miles away, a distance so great that any Earth distances are negligible. It's the same toaster at both latitudes, the same distance away, and yet merely by virtue of the tilted axis of the earth (23.5 degrees) and the consequent daily quantum of direct sunlight, Rugby's temperature this week was 5 below zero and Rio's 71 above.
From every chimney between my kitchen window and the horizon, sluggish house-hovering smoke, as if every building housed a College of Cardinals that had just elected a new pope. Brutally cold mornings like these are strangely quiet and lovely, as if God turned the sound down a few decibels to pay respect to hibernation.
When I walked out to my car, in a thick stocking cap, I listened to my feet breaking the surface of the snow. The muffled crunching as the surface crust gives way is one of my favorite sounds of the Great Plains. On a winter hike of any distance it has a beautiful hypnotic effect. You can hear it in your tires, too, on snowy streets, if you drive slowly and keep the radio off. Unless the wind is blowing, life on severe winter days here is like living in a glycerine aquarium.
My favorite poet, John Donne (1572-1631), captured the essence of this time of year in his solstice poem, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," which was in fact written about the longest night and shortest day of the year.
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk.
Donne's great poem - worth reading in its entirety - suggests that all life at the winter solstice feels as if it has shrunk down to the foot of the bedcovers. I've spent a few winters in England where houses, then and now, have no central heating, and I've done my share of hunkering at the foot of the bed in the fetal position under a mountain of blankets.
Today is the first official day of winter - as if any North Dakotan needed that coy Bureau of Standards announcement. The conventional international designation of seasons has little meaning in North Dakota. If Greenwich were located at Rugby, not east of London, the seasons might run a little differently. Winter: Nov. 15-April 15 (five months). Spring: April 16-June 25 (10 weeks) . Summer: June 26-Sept. 20 (14 weeks). Autumn: Sept. 21-Nov. 14 (10 weeks).
Good news. At 7:04 a.m. today Eastern Standard Time (6:04 here), the sun reached the far other end of its annual pendulum swing, lingering for an instant over the Tropic of Capricorn. The word "solstice" commemorates that almost imperceptible pause at the end of the pendulum swing. It literally means "the sun stands still."
Today is the longest day of the year in Alice Springs, Australia, Easter Island, Kruger National Park in South Africa, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. At high noon in those places, the sun today will be directly overhead. Up here in Dakota the sun will make a lazy little horizon-hugging arc from southeast to southwest, lighting our frigid world for just eight hours, 31 minutes, and 55 seconds. At the summer solstice, on June 21, we get a full 15 hours, 52 minutes, and the afterlight lingers, as you all know, forever.
Why is the solstice good news? We all know winter is just getting rolling in North Dakota, (and with any luck it will be a doozy), but every day hereafter, between 6:04 this morning and your first wind-shattered picnic of 2009, will provide a few more precious minutes of light. For those, like Donne, who suffer from seasonal affective disorder, the worst is now behind us. We stoic North Dakotans, wedded to a fault to common sense, tend to sneer at upstart diagnoses like SAD, which, like gout in the 18th century, have the feel of being disorders of people with too much leisure on their hands. But who among us does not feel a rush of regeneration sometime in February, no matter how cold the weather, when we become aware that the days are noticeably longer?
Theodore Roosevelt was no John Donne, but he lived in North Dakota, not in temperate England, and he wrote about our landscape and climate as well as anyone ever has. More than a hundred years ago he wrote a perfect description of last week's furious blizzard. "When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never ending, then all the great northern plains are changed into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger."
I got a full dose of iron desolation when I returned early last week from a business trip to Memphis, where I had walked around carelessly in my shirtsleeves. Unfortunately, I missed the brunt of the storm, but when I lurched out into the airport parking lot, I found drifts of snow inside my car. That's a brisk wind! Truly, there was an inch-high crust of snow on my steering wheel and a fairly large bank of snow on the back seat.
I had never experienced that before. I turned the key with the confidence of a featherweight in a bout against Mohammed Ali. As I paused on the iron leather seat, strategizing what I knew would be my one and only one attempt at starting the car, I indulged myself with hope, but in my heart I knew the truth. I was welcomed home by the official North Dakota blizzard sound: "click nick click nick ... phut."
When the taxi got me home, 90 minutes later, for the first time in my life I actually had to shovel my way into my house - in the grasshopper jacket, no gloves, no hat, I had worn to Memphis. My house appeared to have been blown about 4 feet off of its foundation.
Ah, but there is good news. The house was toasty. There were no drifts of snow inside the house. And when the next day broke, I discovered that my garden is covered with about 5 feet of drifted snow.
I'm going to have great tomatoes in 2009.
Merry Christmas to you all.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He also is the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage )@aol.com
TrekGirl wrote on Dec 24, 2008 3:44 PM:
Comments are reviewed for taste, tone and language before posting.
Some comments may be used in the Tribune's print edition.