Sun is coming, once we get past the shortest day
- John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
- December 13, 2019
- 1243
Very soon the moment I’ve been looking forward to for nearly six months will be upon us and I will finally be able wake up in the predawn dark with the assurance that each day will be a tiny bit longer than the last.
When it comes to riding back and forth between home and work at this time of year I’m riding in the dark in at least one direction. I’m obligated to clock at least eight hours at the office, and since the season whittles us down to just over 9 hours and 15 minutes of daylight on these shortest days of the year simple math puts me behind a headlight for at least one full direction of the two-way trip.
I’m cool with that in some regard. You definitely see things while riding at night that you’d almost never encounter during the day. I’ve been raced by red fox, dodged by deer and even buzzed by a barred owl. Still, at some point the wonderment of it all wears off and I spend a month of night rides just look forward to getting home and drifting off by the fire.
When all the joys of adventure are considered, I generally favor those that happen in daylight, and a certain weird melancholy strikes me for just a moment on that longest of days in June, the summer solstice, in knowing that from that day forward until just before Christmas I’m going to have a little less sunshine each day. That feeling hits a fever pitch at this time of year.
Thankfully, the same cosmic mechanism that steals away our daylight minutes from the beginning moment of summertime, also hands them back a few ticks at a time once we pass the winter solstice.
Thankfully the same cosmic mechanism that steals away our daylight minutes from beginning of summertime on also hands them back a few ticks at a time once we pass the winter solstice.
I remember being taught as a kid that the whole “winter, spring, summer, fall things happens because “the earth tilts on its axis.” In my childish imagination I always pictured that pudgy oval map of the world at the front of the classroom suddenly tilting one way for summer and the other way for winter. I never questioned the mechanics of the whole mess. I just figured it was the way nature worked. A cosmic switch flipped and the earth just tilted.
Perhaps the strangest part of my whole messed up interpretation of the way things really work with the seasons was the fact that as a child of the Apollo era, I was all about everything “space” from the first moon landing in the summer of my fifth year.
It was not until years later, that I realized what really goes on with that “tilting axis,” and I made sure when my kids were old enough for such craziness, to put each of them through the paces of my Seasons Demonstration just to make sure they weren’t as weird and ill-informed as I was as a kid. In preparation for the writing of this column, I forced my 28 year old daughter and her husband (soon to be parents themselves) to sit through the demonstration while I acted it out with the help of my wife, Kristin.
The whole thing typically begins with an apple and a long, sharp object. The pair become the earth and its axis. In my house the axis is an artist’s paintbrush—an object that can be found in quantity in nearly every room of the place thanks to my wife’s profession. The other necessary piece of equipment is a flashlight which serves as the sun—the brighter and narrower the beam the better.
For our demo, Kristin served as the sun and I orbited around her with the apple-on-a-paintbrush earth taking care to keep the axis tilted at exactly the same 23.5 degrees which I’d estimated by holding the apple to the center of the wall clock and dialing the paintbrush 2/3 of the way to the one o’clock position. With Kristin keeping the beam dutifully trained on the “equator” centerline that I’d scribed on the fruit with a fingernail, it was easy to see the four distinct seasons—especially the winter and summer solstices with their respective “polar regions” in 24 hour darkness and daylight.
The close of our demonstration was accompanied by howls of laughter, for the absurdity of the entire exercise, but you can bet that seven or eight years from now our first grandchild is going to get a first rate lesson on what really brings the change of seasons!
If you have questions or comments, email the Rail Trail Naturalist at jlorson@alonovus.com.