The Dark Side

“Look Mama, it’s a waxing gibbous!”  One small mitten was pointing skyward.

“Oooh, yeah!”  My two daughters had both stopped in their tracks directly in front of me – presumably because the neurons needed for walking, talking, and looking at celestial objects are wired in series rather than in parallel in their brains. “I can see the shadows -- where the long-ago meteors hit it!” 

The kindergarten astronomers were entranced.  It’s the moon!  It’s in the sky!  It’s shining!  Clearly this merited some kind of public service announcement, at the very least.

I tried to share their enthusiasm.  But we’d seen the moon the previous morning on the way to school.  We would see it again tomorrow.  I was concentrating on keeping my footing on our narrow, winding, snow-covered boardwalk while hauling a sled full of groceries.  My headlamp kept slipping down and illuminating random clumps of snow-covered shrubbery.  If we didn’t get moving, the lettuce would freeze into a state of irredeemable black nastiness.  Besides, I was feeling distinctly ambivalent about the giant ball of rock that orbits the earth.  When the moon takes center stage in the afternoon sky in Fairbanks, it means that the sun has headed off towards the Tropic of Capricorn for a vacation.  A long vacation.  That pale celestial orb is the Harbinger of Gloom.  She’s the Queen of Darkness.  She’s the Seasonal Affective Satellite.

I never used to have anything against the moon.  In fact, during the nerdy-science-fiction and wannabe-astrophysicist phase of my life (roughly encompassing everything from age five onwards) I learned an egregious amount of trivia about not only our own moon, but also more esoteric satellites such as Ganymede, Titan, Phobos, and Charon.  Other planets have hordes of little followers.  We have just one, but she’s special.  For a planet Earth’s size, Luna is enormous, practically a sister-planet, which is why she wreaks all kinds of interesting tidal havoc on our world.  Contrary to popular belief, the moon doesn’t have a dark side – at least not a permanent one.  She always shows us the same face, but the phases we see, from new to full and back again, are the month-long lunar day.  Even though our moon’s surface is actually as dark as coal, she reflects an appreciable amount of sunlight – a.k.a. moonlight -- to Earth’s surface.

Enough light, perhaps, to allow a bumbling human to haul groceries along a boardwalk. I gave up on my headlamp, and turned it off.  Minus its distracting flicker, the waxing gibbous seemed even larger, brighter, and more in command of the firmament.  She cast cool shadows across the snow.  The spruce trees were gray against the sky.

“Will it be a full moon tomorrow, Mommy?”

“Um… probably the day after tomorrow,” I hazarded, switching hands on the sled’s narrow tow-rope. 

When I was a kid, I noticed the moon too, but I could never keep track of its phases, and I never thought of it as a source of light.  It also never struck me as being a depressing sun-substitute. The moon decorated the sky, but didn’t illuminate the ground.  That job was already more than covered by the omnipresent street lamps, headlights, and chain-store-neon, as well as the amorphous yet ubiquitous combined glow of Bos-NY-Wash.  I looked at books that showed me which constellations ought to be in the sky.  I remember finding the faint outline of the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia, and then giving up in disappointment.  In the suburbs of New York City, it doesn’t get dark. Not really dark.  Not ever.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager camping in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton Wilderness that I found a sky that looked like a planetarium,  If the moon was full, it felt bright enough to read by (teenagers have good eyes).  At the new moon, it was dark enough to walk straight into the privy pit or the side of a moose.  This was the moon that humanity has obsessed about for the past couple of hundred thousand years. 

Throughout history, the moon has sparked imaginative beliefs, quaint rituals, and a plethora of paranoid and illogical behavior.  Worldwide, we’ve created enough legends about the moon to stuff a library, and enough lunar gods to satisfy the most ardent pantheist.  Artemis, Thoth, Hecate, Chandra, Tarqiup Inua, Luna…  Not everyone agrees what the moon-god’s gender is, although I seem to have been brainwashed by Greco-Roman cultural imperialism in my bias toward “she.” There’s also disagreement as to what awe-inspiring powers he/she/it has, but there are some common threads.  The moon is potent, and mysterious, and might make you a little unbalanced. In fact, it might turn you into a werewolf, a vampire, or – eponymously – a lunatic.  Everyone also seems to agree that the moon is the opposite of the sun – and that the two of them don’t always get along too well.  In November in Fairbanks, this kind of mythology makes perfect sense to me.

Don’t be ridiculous, says my scientist-self.  Cosmically speaking, a G2V yellow dwarf star is no more the opposite of a rocky planetary satellite than a jet engine is the opposite of a piece of belly-button lint.  Sure, ancient people were understandably misled about the whole equal-and-opposite thing, because by strange coincidence, the moon appears to be almost exactly the same size as the sun. This only goes to show that binocular depth perception isn’t worth much at astronomical distances – although it also means that solar eclipses are really cool.  Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of the moon as a winter-time booby-prize as our daylight dwindles.

“Are there any people on the moon right now, Mommy?”

“How come there’s no air there?”

“How did the astronauts breathe?”

“Are air tanks heavy?”

“Why is everything lighter on the moon?”

The kids have lots of questions, but they don’t ask why people went to the moon.  Neither did I, as a kid. I remember being sadly let down when I finally realized, as a much-older child, that NASA astronauts were goaded moonward in the 1960s not just by the wonderful tempting proximity of that bone-dry cratered surface, but also by America’s peculiarly immature competition with the USSR. 

And somehow, it’s the memory of that disappointment, coupled with my own kids’ eagerness, that finally sets me straight.  I knew, once upon a time, that the moon is wonderful in its own right, without comparison, and without a hidden agenda.  When my younger self saw the shadow of our national hubris on the moon, it made me squirm.  Now, when I see my former enthusiasm in a couple of new-millennium kindergarteners, I suddenly notice how irritatingly negative I’m being.  I’m failing to appreciate the subtle-yet-serviceable light on offer, because I’m too busy resenting the fierce glow that is absent. Kids provide a fantastic – and often uncomfortably acute – means of self-examination.  They are merciless mirrors.

The moon is a mirror, too.  For millennia, it has mirrored humanity’s fears about darkness and the unknown, and our dreams about magic and eternal rebirth.  It mirrors our desire to divide everything neatly into black and white, day and night, right and wrong, yin and yang.  And, in the simplest and most literal sense, it mirrors the sun’s rays. 

Far from stealing my sunshine, as I stood there in the snow with my groceries and my grouchy mood, Luna was giving a little sliver of it back to me.   Somewhere, on the other side of the world the sun was blazing.  In South Africa, maybe, or India, someone was catching its full glare.  But here in Fairbanks, we were being treated to a magic trick of sorts.  A trace of sun was being conjured out of space, and donated to us here on the dark side.  It wasn’t much, perhaps, but it was enough to guide a sled, and cast a shadow, and see two kids’ grins.  And like many good magic tricks, it was all done with mirrors. 

Luna is waning now.  I already miss her.  In her absence, I have to recharge my headlamp batteries more often.  I need to take a light with me every time I wander out to the outhouse or check on the dogs.  Without her, I have no shadow.  But here in Fairbanks, a single month represents only a small portion of winter.  Before we hit the very darkest of dark days, the moon will be back.

Weather or not

 

 “I can’t wait for snow!” 

Jay’s comment, made a few weeks ago while we were stealing a day of partial August sunshine at Chena Lakes, was made with the greatest of goodwill and enthusiasm. 

My response, I am ashamed to say, was not.

After my initial outburst left my husband looking shell-shocked and rightfully annoyed, I stumbled to explain.  “Some of us,” I said, “mourn the end of summer.”

Every year, I fight a mental battle against the fading fireweed and yellowing leaves.  This doesn’t exactly qualify as a unique idiosyncrasy. Fairbanks in August is full of people desperately trying to insulate partially-built houses, persuade tomatoes to ripen before they freeze, and split eight gazillion cords of firewood.  Railing against the onset of fall is so common that it didn’t occur to me that I needed to justify it – until Jay challenged my view of reality.

Winter, my husband maintained – honestly perplexed in the face of my vehement melancholy -- has a lot to offer. There’s so much cross-country skiing and snow-biking to be done!  There are miles of perfect trails right outside our doors.  There are winter races, and trips to remote cabins! 

He’s right, of course.  I enjoy all these things too.  I cast my mind forward to sometime around Valentine’s Day, when rapidly returning sunshine glitters on the snow, the ice park offers small children exhilarating ways to injure themselves, and Jay and I entertain ourselves with hundred-mile ski races and other light frivolity. March in Fairbanks may be one of Alaska’s best kept secrets.  Don’t let anyone know how nice it is, or we’ll be mobbed by tourists.

Other seasons are pretty high on the awesomeness scale, too.  The fantastic March fun lasts well into April.  Hard on its heels, May is like a can of sweetened condensed spring: in the space of 31 days, we go from slush puddles and bare branches to a lush green wonderland liberally splashed with the red-pink of wild roses.  Little reindeer calves stagger about on wobbly legs.  Everyone finds all the possessions they lost under the snow seven months previously.  By the end of the month, it’s summer.

Summers are great here – hot enough for all the hallmarks of the warmest season – sand castles, drippy ice cream cones, free Vitamin D -- but almost never sweaty enough to make me long for air conditioning, ice packs, or a ticket to Antarctica.  Between June and August we get everything we should – shorts, bike rides, lakeshores, butterflies, berry picking – with a few mosquitoes thrown in to remind us that life isn’t perfect. 

So what’s my problem?  What DO I want, climate-wise?   Not, I hasten to add, for the good of the planet.  My official opinion there is that we should stop screwing with the system, pronto, before all the SUV-exhaust and cattle-flatulence turns Earth into Venus’s sorry step-child.  But in the fantasy world inside my own head, in which I have the power to crown myself Grand High Weather Deity (aka Earl), what would the weather look like?

“Look!  The leaves are falling!  That’s why it’s fall!”  The kids are thrilled not only by the fluttering leaves, which they spectacularly fail to catch, but also by their attempt at a pun. I don’t break it to them that this in fact why Americans call the season by that name in the first place.  Fall, autumn – whichever it is, it’s at the height of its splendor.  Yellow birch leaves adorn every hillside, and the willows have turned every Crayola shade between burnt umber, tangerine, and crimson.  The mornings are lightly frosted, but by nine a.m. the sun has burnt away the chill and is promising an afternoon of playgrounds and bike riding.  Perversely, this season whose coming I fought against last month is one of my favorites.  September in Fairbanks is beyond reproach. 

Autumnal grouchiness notwithstanding, I know I don’t really want perpetual July.  Plenty of people yearn for a climate in which halter tops are year-round garb, but I’ve never been one of them.  I spent more than two years living in sunny Jamaica, and I know from experience that unrelenting heat makes me wilt with sweat and boredom.  I missed the sensation of sleeping snuggled under a blanket.  I wanted to eat steaming bowls of soup and drink mugs of cocoa.  I wanted to welcome -- rather than resent -- having a cat curl up in my lap.  I was in a Grinchy mood when I hung baubles on palm trees.  I was perpetually damp and sticky, my skin burned right through the congealing layers of ultra-sunblock, and I longed for a vicious cold snap to kill every creeping, buzzing cockroach and mosquito. 

Cockroaches aren’t a problem in Fairbanks. Winter here starts in October, when the muddy trails freeze firm and the first flying flakes bring back memories of being a kid, Back then, at the first sign of dark gray winter clouds, I’d rush to tap the barometer and comb through the meteorological predictions.  “It’s snowing, it’s snowing!”  Radiators draped with sodden mittens were signs of great joy and contentment.  Even if the grownups felt otherwise, I hated the fact that in the greater New York area, snow turns to brown sludge and disappears within days.  

Fairbanks snow doesn’t disappear.  Here, November and December offer the sort of non-denominational picture-book holiday season that always seemed frustratingly elusive to me as a child.  Sleigh bells?  Sure, just hang some on the dog sled.  Jack Frost?   Yup.  Chestnuts roasting on an open fire?  Maybe a wood stove, but close enough.  White Yuletides are guaranteed.  The winter solstice is imbued with deep meaning to everyone, not just meteorologists and Wiccans.  Our property is almost entirely vegetated by Christmas trees.  My daily commute takes me past enough reindeer for Santa to field a full team, plus substitutes. 

Then the New Year arrives with a thud.  The holidays are over.  It is still woefully cold and dark, and the end is not in sight. In the depths of January, the weather is not just harsh, it’s downright mean.  There’s cold, and there’s nose-hair-crackling cold, and then there’s the sort of cold that makes any inch of exposed flesh try to turn itself inside out.  Last winter, a little boy at the twins’ preschool lost a substantial amount of tongue to the iron railing next to the playground steps.  I always thought this was something that occurred only in fiction, but a long-suffering preschool teacher assured me that in Fairbanks, this sort of thing passes for normal.  She’s thawed dozens of tongues.  Part of my brain, the not-very-nice part, was thinking, “At least it wasn’t my kid.”  Another part, the Eeyore part, was thinking, “See?  This place just isn’t fit for warm-blooded life-forms.”

The problem, I now realize, is not that I don’t appreciate fall, or that I don’t like winter.  The problem is that winter – cozy, snowy, enjoyable season that it is -- is interrupted by another season.  A season of blackness and numbness, of gelling fuel oil, cracking fingertips, and creeping torpor.  A season that steals away time from the other four fabulous quadrants of the year, leaving me with not quite enough beach time, too little photogenic foliage, inadequate bud-bursting springtime, and curtailed sledding.  What I’m dreading is a season called January. 

That day at the beach last month, I told Jay that I mourn the loss of summer because it’s too short, and winter is too long.  I claimed that although I like them both, I wish they were more evenly distributed around the calendar.  Under closer scrutiny, however, I have to admit that this argument is flawed. Winter is not too long.  It’s that other season.  Because, truth be told, January is much too long.  It’s at least thirty-one days too long – and generally more.  The groundhog doesn’t even bother to check for his shadow around here, because he leaves our entire ecosystem to his hardier marmot cousins.  Thus, belying math and logic, January is sometimes up to sixty days too long.

Knowing this doesn’t really change anything, of course, but it does perk me up enough to prevent me from further irritating my spouse. It solves half my problem in a single slice of logic. It’s not January now!  It’s only September, and I love September!  If I behave the way dogs and kids do, living in the moment, I can enjoy all the terrific seasons while they’re happening, without having to mope about what I’m losing or what comes next. 

And when January does arrive, I’m developing a multi-pronged strategy to deal with it, based on well-tested Fairbanks traditions.  The first option involves bundling up myself and my kids in so many clothes that we can be rolled around like beach balls, and pretending that we’re enjoying long jaunts by headlamp.  The second approach is creating an alternate reality in which we hang out in over-heated fluorescent-lit buildings wearing t-shirts and eating ice cream.  The third coping mechanism is boasting.  This involves posting weather reports to Facebook in order to prove that we are suffering more than anyone in Maine or Idaho or Saskatchewan, and are therefore superior, albeit in a fraternity-hazing-ritual kind of way.

I’ve also got a fourth strategy lined up for January.  Jay still doesn’t agree with my perspective, but he’s nice enough to play along.  This leaves me free to employ a tried-and-true method for dealing with at least one week of the unwanted month. That's right -- we’ve got plane tickets.