Ah, the old Autumnal Equinox

Fall arrived Tuesday evening, so we are told. The orbit and tilt of the earth is not a thing that matches perfectly with our calendars, so this time it landed on September 22, which is actually more common than the 21st.

If you want just a touch of science (I know you do), what’s happening is that the tilt of the earth, as it swings in its orbit around the sun, is such that the sun is crossing the equator around September 22 (directly overhead there at noon). Unfortunately for us, it’s on its way down south of that, eventually to over the imaginary line from our school globes called the Tropic of Capricorn. It reaches there about December 21, when we in the northern hemisphere enjoy our shortest day of the year. You remember that: getting dark at four in the afternoon, no light in the morning until almost eight o’clock.

Tuesday was called the Fall Equinox or the “Autumnal Equinox” if we want to be even more verbose— meaning “equal night”, but it’s really meaning equal day and night.

I once spent a year in Resolute Bay, up on the arctic islands, as a weather observer in what now seems like a previous life. Like down here, September 22 is the usual “equinox” in Resolute, with equal day and night, but the sun is at such a low angle there that in the winter it can’t get over the horizon at all (I’ll keep referring to the sun doing something, which we humans have done since the beginning of time, though it’s us who are really doing most of the moving). In the summer, it manages to shine at a low angle right over the North Pole, such that it’s seen all day. I lived in the “Land of the Midnight Sun”.

Spring there was, for a time, similar to down here– though colder of course. As we started for June 21, the days rapidly got longer, until it was just one long day. Through at least June and July, the sun never set. You would look out at 2 p.m. and there it was, fairly low in the sky, about as we might see it at suppertime here. You would look out at 2 a.m., and it was on the other side of things, but still there, low in the sky. Relative to us, round and round it went, low in the sky, never going down.

That was nice in some ways, troublesome in others. I don’t think the biological clock liked it too well. After a time, particularly working shift work, which most of us were (even the airport tended to run on an almost 24 hour schedule– there was no advantage to landing a plane in the afternoon if it was just as bright at 3 a.m.), you started to lose a bit of track of which side of the day you were on. I can recall once working for several days with little break and little sleep, and then crashing in my room. I woke later, having the ability then (which I seem to have lost) of sleeping long periods, and stumbled out to inquire whether it was 2 p.m. or 2 a.m.

Just sleeping was a problem for some. We had plywood panels that fit into our room windows to block out the sun. They were painted dull black, but because of that tended to trap the heat if the sun was on your side of the building in the “night” or whenever it was you chose to do your sleeping. After a few episodes of waking up and finding the room exceptionally hot, most of us managed to steal foil wrap from somewhere and coat the outside of the panel with it to reflect the radiation.

Certainly there are some benefits to the 24 hour sun: work in daylight at any time of day, go for a walk across the tundra at any time of day or night, and feel relative warmth for that latitude (temperatures got into the 60’s, Fahrenheit). We were well north of the tree line, so the landscape was limited to gravel, rock, and small plants and bushes that managed to struggle into life. Herds of furry muskoxen would wander nearby, grazing on what they could find. I suspect they fattened up in summer (though I don’t know how, given their size), in preparation for living on almost nothing in the winter.

When I arrived in Resolute, it was July, and I was treated to this land of constant sunlight right from the start. We paid for it later, of course.

When we crossed this fall time of year, the sun had started to set regularly, and the days and nights were about the same length, as they are expected to be. But the nights rapidly increased in length at a frightening rate, and by early November we were paying the cost for the Midnight Sun: the Noontime Dark. Our sun was gone.

For a time, there was a glow at midday, as though Old Sol was struggling to get above the horizon, but gave up the notion and left again. Then, as we moved into December, day just didn’t exist. Dark. All the time. All night, to be sure, and all day too. For days. For weeks. For months, broken only by starlight and the occasional moon.

Certainly a little harder to take, particularly for some. Now it was a case of look out at 2 a.m. and it was dark– you expected that. Look out at 2 p.m., and it was still dark. Couldn’t conjure up the sun no matter how you tried. No need to have the panels in the windows, but you sure relied on the electricity. The station was a glow of electric daylight in the midst of a black terrain, probably only a pinpoint from space.

To be honest, it didn’t bother me that much. We were frequently short-staffed, and worked long hours. In our off time, we did a lot of reading (at least I did). A few of us played musical instruments and would occasionally get together. We shot a lot of pool. We waited for the mail. We talked.

We didn’t go for long walks.

We didn’t have a lot of snowstorms, since we were well north of most fronts, so the snow tended to come in September and stay until May. It was cold: down to -57 F the year I was there, below -40 for many days in January and February. With the electric lights, you could almost pretend you were in daylight, except for two tasks that took us away from the air base and our weather station: we had to measure the thickness of the harbour ice and take a snow sampling once a month.

Measuring the thickness of the harbour ice was relatively easy. We drove our Bombardier snowmobile (tracks on the back, one ski and one wheel on the front) down to the bay, dug through the snow, drilled a hole through the ice until we hit water, then dropped a tape and took a measure. When I first arrived, this was done with a manual brace and bit, adding extensions to the bit as you went down six to eight feet. After a month or so into the fall, we got the notion of adding some power, so resorted to taking a portable generator and a half-inch electric drill, and were drilling though in minutes. That practice got adopted at all the other weather stations in time. In winter we operated in the glow of the running snowmobile (they were seldom turned off when outdoors in winter, and almost always put inside the garage when not being used).

The snow measurement was trickier. We didn’t go far, just a few hundred feet behind our weather station, but that was a quarter mile away from the main airport. While we took the snowmobile, we had to park it and set off from there, since we couldn’t disturb the snow. We had to measure the depth, and take core samples in a line over some distance to get an average.

The concern we had was that it was dark as pitch other than where our flashlights shone, and there were other things out there in winter. Bad things. Of prime concern were loose Inuit dogs from the village a few miles away. Not a good thing to run into. One day in spring I watched the RCMP officer assigned to the base (only one—what an assignment!) attempt to drive a dog away from a muskox that it was harassing mercilessly near the runway. The dog turned on the officer as he approached, and he shot it with his revolver from ten feet away as it charged him. He would have been badly mauled if he hadn’t.

While dogs were the more likely danger, there were even more fearsome creatures in the dark: polar bears. A few of us had even seen one in the fall, loping across just the area we were measuring. A polar bear on his hind legs can stand eight feet tall. It would not make your day to meet one in the dark cold, particularly when it might not have eaten in a month or so. There was a painting in the weather office, artist and date unknown, depicting the true story of one observer who ran into a bear when walking outside to check the temperatures in the Stephenson Screen. After a brief tussle with the bear, he managed to escape onto the roof by running up a snow drift, thankfully with only a few bad scratches and a missing ear. That was at the main airport office, much more populated and better lit.

Half our staff was American, as the five high arctic weather stations at that time were part of the “Joint Arctic Weather Stations”, with partial U.S. staff and a lot of U.S. equipment and money. While the Canadian government might have provided us with a hockey stick as a weapon against polar bears, the U.S. government applied a more American solution to the issue: a 45 caliber automatic. One of us would carry this in our parka pocket when we went out in the dark for the snow measurement.

There was a good likelihood that the chaos and confusion resulting from the sudden arrival of a polar bear, and the screams when one of us shot the other would have been enough to scare off even the hungriest bear; fortunately, we never had the necessity to fire the thing. We took our measurements as rapidly as we could, watching over our shoulders for the bear or the guy with the gun, and beat it back to the station unscathed by man or beast.

An interesting thing would happen when we returned inside. After about an hour out in the cold, even in the pocket of the appointed gunman, when the weapon was set on a table in the office, it would within minutes take on a completely white look as it frosted over.

The population of Resolute, the main station area, swelled to about 250 in the summer, but dropped down to about 80 in the winter. You got to know most of the people there (mainly men), and as winter progressed, a “bushed” list was posted near the cafeteria. On this list were the top ten who were the most “bushed”, or starting serious issues with the darkness and loneliness of an arctic winter. This tended to show up in behavior like hyper and erratic talk and actions, wild and wooly beards and hair, and sometimes even slack personal cleanliness. Fortunately, I never made the list.

I cut quite a few heads of hair after the fellow who usually acted as barber went south, until I managed to badly cut one fellow’s ear with my scissors, and that negatively impacted my reputation (not being able to get the bloodstain out of the barber apron might have had some effect as well. No knowledge of history, those fellows. Didn’t they know that centuries ago, the barber was someone you went to for “blood-letting”, and in fact the striped barber pole was a depiction of blood flowing down?)

In late January, we were seeing a glow at midday, indicating that maybe the sun was coming back from its holiday down south. I believe it was February 7 that a few of us were standing in the main street and witnessed a crescent of sun poke above the horizon, and then drop back down again. Wow! We cheered like idiots, and then went inside before it got too dark.

Each day brought more and more sunlight, until spring arrived, we saw the snow start to melt, and soon we looked around for the panel to stick in the window.

For many of us, we were also looking at something else: the anniversary of our arrival and a flight south again, where people calmly walked the streets and took the sun for granted.

If nothing else, my time there gave me an appreciation of a couple of the benefits of work in the “normal” work. I never minded the hours of working at a normal job. Until the end of my teaching career and other jobs, I was still amazed that they let you go home again every day of the week, not just once a year.

And, as the days now get shorter, as we move toward that dark day of December 21… hey—that sun is still there, every day, for hours and hours.

It could be worse!

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