Monday, May 22, 2006

The Sun Never Sets on Tulita

The sun set at 11:59pm last night, according to Environment Canada. That means tonight will be the first official Midnight Sun of this year. Not that anyone except me is marking this significant occasion. I won't even be staying up for it. I have to report to work in the morning, and so does Nicole.

Before we moved up here, several people warned us about the long days. You would think that days of darkness would get depressing, and they might. But the body will wake up when it has had enough sleep, regardless of the light outside. However, getting to sleep when daylight is still leaking though your blinds at 11:30 at night is another story. When you wake up at 5:00 in the morning, it could just as easily be 5:00 in the evening. The only way to know for sure is to look at a clock.

The idea of 24 hour daylight has always held a certain place in my imagination. One of my earliest memories is my father reading Robert Service poems to me. For someone who is skeptical of any work of fiction beyond a Clint Eastwood movie or an episode of CSI, Robert Service has always been unusually high on Dad's list of favorite writers.

Service went to the Yukon for the gold rush of 1898, but he made his fortune writing thousands of poems about the men of the gold rush. All of his poems rhyme and most have the same sing-song rhythm. For that reason, they are dismissed as doggerel by the literary snobs of today. Still, I've been known to read Service now and then. I brought two volumes of his collected works with me. They're somewhere downstairs in a rubbermaid tub sealed with packing tape.

When Dad read to me about the "strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold," I never dreamed that I would find myself here under a midnight sun, moiling for a paycheque from the grocery store.

Today we move into our house. This will be then end of my easy access to the internet. You might not hear from me for a few days.

1 comment:

mylias said...

You miss a 'd' in your blog introduction description. Was that done on purpose?