It’s the first day of fall.
Though it’s not quite the yin-yang of day perfectly embracing night, a case of 12 and 12.
Due to a standard accounting practice which declares sunrise the instant the first rays crest the horizon, but which doesn’t confer sunset until the entire orb has descended out of sight, today actually has about 36 minutes more light than dark. Monday will be the first day where night is technically longer.
Sometimes it feels like fall stumbles onto the Kenai Peninsula at the end of July. One year I was setnetting near the Kasilof River and we tramped out at 2 a.m. on July 31 to pick fish. On the way to the dock, I heard the sound of shattering glass and looked down to see a brittle cellophane of ice across the puddle beneath my XtraTuffs. That broke some illusions.
Other years, fall descends more gently, a long night’s rain and fireweed rusting in the fields. The willow and cottonwood and birch reprise a summer’s worth of sun in miniature, a wealth of pieces of gold. Until the first fall blow.
Equinox is a time of balance, and Alaskans aren’t especially good at that. Alaskans are made for midnight sun and northern lights, for standing outside around a fire all night long for those solstice celebrations. The way you can tell a real Alaskan is by his indifference to whether the solstice is summer or winter. He’s ready to party either way.
Alaskans don’t have much vision for the balance thing. All things being equal may work at the equator but equanimity has never been a staple polar product. This is an all-or-nothing place.
It’s go-for-broke from May Day till August rolls in, and Halloween to Groundhog Day it’s time to roll out. All the smart species do — whales, salmon, sandhill cranes.
And the smart sourdoughs followed — the gold miners and the cannery fishermen spent winter in Alaska in Seattle and San Francisco. Cheechako pipeline workers spent it in Maui.
What can you say about those who stay?
It’s best if, like bears, they crawl in their hole and lay low.
I grew up in New England, where fall is a season. Yellow raincoats and orange pumpkins and red oak leaves. There were weeks of raking and burning, and great pumpkins to eat and carve. Halloween was a fall celebration — no snow boots required — and raincoats and windbreakers worked fine into November. Football started in September and ran till Thanksgiving.
In Alaska, fall is less a season than an edge, a page that turns.
That might be changing. Moose hunting opens Aug. 20 because that traditionally meant good fall weather. Now it’s too hot to hunt on opening day and mooseketeers have to pack sunscreen and those little umbrellas for their drinks.
On the other hand, school now starts so far before Labor Day — two weeks of classes in August — that it’s hard to fit in the monstrous Matanuska cabbages at the state fair. The children’s heads are already buzzing with spelling bees before they can appreciate the summer work of honey bees.
There are lots of cute condensations of Alaska seasons — “almost winter, winter, still winter and construction season” and “winter, breakup, summer and freeze-up.”
Beware the latitudes where spring doesn’t actually spring but rather just thaws out, and which is celebrated by an Ice Classic. Likewise, freeze-up seems a starkly truncated version of the “the turn” and “the fall” of the leaves — “autumn” means “the time of harvest plenty,” which doesn’t survive freeze-dried.
Autumnal equinox is also known as Mabon or the Festival of Alban Elfed. It’s called the Wine Harvest, celebrating Dionysus and Bacchus. That might mean that there are merrymakers around Homer who can lead us around the corner into the new season. They’ve been practicing since June 21.
Or maybe they’re just getting ready. For Dec. 21.
Columnist Geo Beach can be reached at geobeach@columnist.com.
We encourage you to add your comments. To prevent spam, comments with links are manually approved during the normal business day. Please be respectful of others with your comments, bear in mind anyone in the community may be reading your comments.
