This coming
Tuesday marks the beginning of what I call the 91 days of light. It’s the day
of the summer solstice (June 21 this year) and the 45 days on either side. The
period from May 7 to August 5 will be the quarter of the year with the longest
days.
At some
point in the past this must have been considered summer, hence the designation
of solstice day as Midsummer. Actual summer runs from June 21 to September 22.
What I think of as high summer, the time when students are out of school and
the beaches are packed on weekdays runs roughly from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Even that
is not a strictly accurate measurement. It used to be, in California at least,
that the schools didn’t get going until after Labor Day. Now they start a week
or two before, which makes those last two weeks of August a great time for a
getaway for mature adults.
What to Do With the Long Days
During the
days of light, sunset is at 8 p.m. or later, with another half hour of decent
light immediately afterward. In the mornings, it’s light before 6 a.m. Plenty
of time, in any event, for a walk before work or after dinner.
Every
season has its points, but summer, however you calculate it, is my favorite.
Growing up in Los Angeles, it meant staying out playing really late in warm, if
not downright hot, weather. Now it means barbecuing in shorts and a T-shirt (if
the fog hasn’t rolled in early) then going for a walk on the beach after
dinner. On the whole, the longer days and extra light mean more time to
appreciate the world around you.
That sense
of squeezing every moment for all it’s worth is particularly powerful when
you’re on vacation. If you’ve spent a day getting somewhere, and have only a
few days there once you arrive, long summer nights are value-added. In my
formative years, our parents took us on several long driving trips during
summer vacation. Often, we’d check into a place around 4 p.m. and have dinner,
then my sister and I would play afterward.
Long Nights 50 Years Ago
It’s
amazing how vividly I can recall some of those places 50 years later, and a
large part of that is that we had a long summer night to impress them on our
minds. Just off the top of my head, I’m flashing back on a cabin on the Snake
River in Idaho; a motor court along the Willamette River in Oregon; a ranch in
Wyoming; a summer home without electricity in Puget Sound, Washington; and a
garden-variety motel in Penticton, British Columbia, where we sat outside the
door under an overhang, watching a powerful thunderstorm break up at sunset.
Plenty of
fishing memories, too. My father always used to insist that you had to get up
early to catch fish, a theory for which the evidence seemed spotty at best. I
remember plenty of May and June mornings in the mountains, where we hit the
water before 6 a.m. and were freezing and miserable for three or four hours
before the sun finally warmed things up. On a more positive note, there’s
nothing like being on Hat Creek in Northern California when a good evening
insect hatch gets going in May and June and the fish are on a binge.
We have no
plans to go anywhere during the 91 days this year, so I’ll be enjoying them at
home. And in coastal California, it takes a long time for summer to dissolve
into fall, so we could get two more months of summer after the 91 days end —
but without those long nights.
Originally posted May 4, 2012; dates adjusted for this year.
