Summer and night time go hand in hand (except north of 60)
It was well past midnight last night when I finally got around to going to bed.
I took a peek out the window to make sure all was well with the world, and much to my surprise, I saw a sky filled with stars.
You can forget about stars when you haven’t seen them for a while, and I hadn’t seen any since the early spring. Out of sight out of mind, as the old saying goes.
And up here in the land of the Midnight Sun, the only star you do see in the summer time is that big yellow fireball folks like to call the Sun.
In my opinion, the worst thing about summers North of 60 is the Sun.
Oh, 24 hours of sunshine a day is neat, don’t get me wrong. Having to put aluminium foil over your windows so you can sleep at “night” is something everyone should experience at least once in their lives.
But for me, summertime and nighttime just seem to go hand in hand.
Maybe it comes from so many summer nights during my formative years at bonfire parties on a beach with a full moon and a sky full of stars shining down.
Experts say even under optimum viewing conditions you can only see at most about 2,000 stars in the night sky. But those experts must never have sat on the shores of the beautiful Miramichi River on a warm summer’s night with some good friends basking in starlight cause they could have counted a million or so.
I miss that.
Funny. Until, last night, I’d forgotten I hadn’t seen starlight since long before spring.
There’s no point to this story, I guess. But seeing the starlight up here again means the summer is done, and I guess I wanted to write about how winter would soon be on its way. But as anybody who’s ever put ink on paper for bread can tell you, sometimes the writing takes you where it wants to go and it didn’t want to go there. It wanted to remind me I’m finishing another summer where I wasn’t on the Miramichi, which is something like 6,000 or so kilometres away on the other side of a continent and I’m writing my 111th column, which got me thinking of home and I guess I wouldn’t mind being there right now.
I took a peek out the window to make sure all was well with the world, and much to my surprise, I saw a sky filled with stars.
You can forget about stars when you haven’t seen them for a while, and I hadn’t seen any since the early spring. Out of sight out of mind, as the old saying goes.
And up here in the land of the Midnight Sun, the only star you do see in the summer time is that big yellow fireball folks like to call the Sun.
In my opinion, the worst thing about summers North of 60 is the Sun.
Oh, 24 hours of sunshine a day is neat, don’t get me wrong. Having to put aluminium foil over your windows so you can sleep at “night” is something everyone should experience at least once in their lives.
But for me, summertime and nighttime just seem to go hand in hand.
Maybe it comes from so many summer nights during my formative years at bonfire parties on a beach with a full moon and a sky full of stars shining down.
Experts say even under optimum viewing conditions you can only see at most about 2,000 stars in the night sky. But those experts must never have sat on the shores of the beautiful Miramichi River on a warm summer’s night with some good friends basking in starlight cause they could have counted a million or so.
I miss that.
Funny. Until, last night, I’d forgotten I hadn’t seen starlight since long before spring.
There’s no point to this story, I guess. But seeing the starlight up here again means the summer is done, and I guess I wanted to write about how winter would soon be on its way. But as anybody who’s ever put ink on paper for bread can tell you, sometimes the writing takes you where it wants to go and it didn’t want to go there. It wanted to remind me I’m finishing another summer where I wasn’t on the Miramichi, which is something like 6,000 or so kilometres away on the other side of a continent and I’m writing my 111th column, which got me thinking of home and I guess I wouldn’t mind being there right now.
posted by Street Wise Guy | 4:46 AM
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