Solstice

Yesterday I read this: "Summer solstice, the longest day of the year, inspired Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and is associated with the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden."

Then, this morning as I walked along the American River about 20 minutes before sunrise on the first day of summer, I thought this: If you have to get exiled from someplace, what could be better than having it happen on the longest day of the year? You'd have plenty of daylight as you packed, consulted your map, built your shelter, and finally lay down in anticipation of the next sunrise. And, alone as you were, I imagine that after a day or so you'd feel a bit relieved that the threat of exile was gone. How good is it, after all, to live in constant fear of being exiled?

But, today, more detached than exiled, I was glad to be out early, before the sun began toasting the Sacramento Valley. When I was a kid and for once in my life happened to listen to my father, he said that he had always enjoyed the early morning. Decades later I would understand why as I stood on the catwalk of an aircraft carrier somewhere on the Pacific Ocean and watched the sun come up and the dark go down. Then, later still, I learned how a man alone in a car in the middle of Nevada could feel quite good while counting pre-sunrise contrails. Even in the grip of something unpleasant that same man might find comfort in what the morning sky offers.

This morning the sky was a layer of clouds that shrouded the Sierra Nevada and suppressed sunrise, which was not such a bad thing considering predictions of an afternoon temperature north of the century mark. I was reminded of at-sea days in the southern Pacific when we would sleep not in our stifling berthing compartments but, if planes weren't flying, on the ship's flight deck. Those days, the sun rose and set heavy on a flat horizon, and the water barely moved. Once, standing on that same catwalk with some shipmates, we watched a strange line of something in the water, and the line was moving toward the ship. Minutes later that line turned out to be a pod of porpoises that edged alongside the the ship's bow--several hundred pounds of prime porpoise keeping pace with millions of pounds of sailors, steel, machinery, and assorted petroleum-based fluids.

The clouds dismissed the sun just before I reached the half-way point and turned west, and I was glad for the warmth on my back. And in the late afternoon doldrums, I found this from Act V of A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains...."

At some level in the heat, that line made sense.