The encroaching dark
posted in Alaska, OmegaMom, Photography, Weather, Winter |
The sun rose at 9:49 in the morning, and will set at 3:51 p.m., just a few more minutes. We had a visit from the Pineapple Express yesterday; it is Alaska’s answer to the Polar Express. Where the Polar Express is a blast of frigid Arctic air that swirls down into the Midwest following a huge dip in the jet stream, the Pineapple Express is a blast of warm air direct from Hawaii that barrels into South Central Alaska, melting the snow and ice and producing precipitation of one form or another.
First we got the melt. You’d think this would be great, wouldn’t you? But, alas, what it does is denude the forests of the one thing that keeps it bright in the wintertime, and leaves the skies gray.
Then we got the storm. Where the Omegas live, it came as a day of rain–we were up to 40F. But to the west, only about 30 miles away, the temperature was low enough that it came as snow, a huge snowstorm on the Lady River that dumped 30+ inches of snow in the hinterlands and in Small Alaskan Tourist Town That Prompted Northern Exposure. A substitute school secretary in SATTTPNE said they had enough snow that the littlies, kindergartners and first-graders, were disappearing into the snowdrifts.
And then the weather turned cooler here, and our rain turned to snow. So: we had wet streets, car, trees, that iced up, then got snowed on. Then the skies turned clear.
When I drove the dotter in to school, the full moon was hovering over the trees in the west side of the school parking lot. The sun was just barely beginning to light up the skies to the east. I dropped her off, ran to the convenience store, and drove home…but that lovely picture of the moon looming over the trees called to me. At home, I ran into the office, grabbed the camera and drove back to the school, determined to get that picture.
Alas, it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted–I wanted that moon in the trees to be as crisp and clear as it was to my vision. Since I haven’t worked out the ins and outs of the camera workings, I couldn’t figure out how to make everything in focus and not too bright. So what you see above is what you get: Moonlit trees slightly lighted by the first, faint blush of daylight.
It was beautiful.
That is what I live for, up here in Alaska during the winter. Moments like that. Because there is so much darkness at this time of year, and my annual bitchfest about the ever-encroaching darkness is revving up. I talk to people on the phone…they say, “How d’you like the cold winters in Alaska?” with a bit of laughter in their voices. And I talk to them about The Darkness.
It’s just a month or two that it’s bad, mind you. I know that the winter solstice is fast approaching, and that three weeks after that, we will settle into the long cold bright time of year, where the days get longer but the chill of winter settles in deeper. The cold is okay, really. Because the sun comes out more and more each day, and sparkles off the snow and the mountains and the ice covering the inlet and the rivers and the waterfalls, so it is beautiful. And behind it all is the knowledge that The Dark is Dying, the sun is coming back, spring will be here soon, and we will be into the Season of The Gloaming.
But that month and a half to two months where it just gets darker and darker? It gets to me. The sun was 6.8 degrees above the horizon today at its height. That’s low. That’s like “late afternoon just before sunset” low.
(The solstice is coming. It’ll get here. The dark will go away.)
