Old Man Winter is Coming for Winnipeg Golfers
A lot of people are still complaining about last winter, how cold and long it was. But not me.
Sure it was cold and as long as ever, but it seemed to fly by — it started and before you knew it was over.
The reason, at least for me, is that I don’t measure winter by the depth to which temperatures fall or to which snow accumulates, but rather by the length of day and light.
The band War long ago had a hit song called Slippin’ into Darkness. It’s about falling into a life of drugs and crime, but to me it’s always been about winter. It starts looping in my brain as the days grow short in the fall and that point approaches when we “fall back” into standard time so that the commute home is always in darkness, week after week, month after month.
I find it not depressing so much as dreadful and hostile, the opposite of the joyful, warm evenings of summer.
But last year we changed the timing, “falling back” one week later and then “springing forward” three weeks earlier this, er, spring.
Altogether, a month more of evening light.
After a lifetime of winters under the old regime, I suspect timing of the season, the portents of its arrival and passing become so familiar as to be ingrained. And then this year, the habit was broken — the sun broke through three weeks early and with it winter broke, too.
The rhythms of summer likewise become ingrained.
Some years ago I was in Guyana on the equator in winter. Each day started and ended at 5:30. It was confusing and disorienting to have the sun go down so early on a summer’s day. When it’s warm and the smell of flowers and mowed grass is in the air, the sun is supposed to shine on for hours and hours.
I know many Manitobans love and embrace winter, and I’m not saying that it’s all bad, but summer is simply so much better for the basic, even primal, reason that there is both more heat and light, especially in the evening.
Which brings me to what I’m really thinking about.
Last year, by coincidence, I was on vacation June 21 when the solstice occurs, when the day is at its longest and the night its shortest.
It is also the sweetest part of summer, flowers are fresh, trees and shrubs are blooming and birds outnumber mosquitoes.
And it doesn’t get better — literally. After June 21 we start slipping into darkness again, by a few seconds a day to be sure, but slipping nevertheless.
In some places people understand and celebrate the moment.
I was in St. Petersburg once just before the solstice. The city is on roughly the same latitude as Churchill, so it enjoys even shorter days and evenings than we do here in Winnipeg. (I still wonder if it is the high latitudes that explain why depression and alcoholism are rampant in Russian life and literature.)
The Russians were gearing up for their annual “White Nights” celebrations, a week-long debauch that occurs around the solstice, when the sun barely sets and the light never entirely fades.
I experienced a bit of that the year we lived in The Pas. I thought summer would never come but when it did the evenings went on forever and you could see light in the north long after it had faded to black to the south.
I’m told Iceland celebrates the solstice with Icelanders staying up all night to witness the fact that the sun doesn’t set.
In any event, having realized the great benefits of a vacation in June last year, I booked two weeks around the solstice this year.
June 21 fell on a Saturday due to this being a leap year.
Leap years are a contrivance to rectify our imperfect system of telling time with the perfect movements of the solar system, which meant the solstice actually fell at 6:59 p.m. on Friday, about three hours before the sun, in fact, went down.
(It’s a puzzler, isn’t it? I mean, that the longest day ended a day early and before the sun went down. Science, eh!)
But I didn’t let science spoil the day. I arranged with some friends to play golf that evening. We teed off at 5:30 and finished at 10. Sunset was 9:41 and we followed our last shots to the par three finishing hole as silhouettes — black balls against a white sky.
But we finished, and it was great to be playing in the cool of the evening as the shadows lengthened as opposed to the heat of the day when shadows shrink to little pools at the base of trees.
It made me think that we should follow the example of other northern dwellers and learn to celebrate the solstice. I mentioned this to my barber and he responded that to most people the solstice marks the beginning of summer, and that’s likely true.
So why don’t we get more bang out of it? Why don’t we recognize that while July and August are “hot,” June is “cool” and the sweetest part of summer is the solstice.
I’m going to do my part. I plan to golf on the evening of June 21 next year, hopefully with an enlarged pool of players, maybe the start of a Solstice Open.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/columnists/top3/story/4195386p-4786611c.html
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