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Seeking Darkness
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In a blog post from last September, I wrote how I felt like I was ‘chasing light’ by hopping from summer in the northern hemisphere to catch another summer in New Zealand, only after doing similar hemisphere-hopping travels the year prior. Now, back in the northern hemisphere, we have recently passed the summer solstice—the day with the most light each year. For me, this marks five summer solstices in a row without experiencing a winter solstice. I, indeed, have been chasing light.
But, in my hemisphere-hopping quest for summer light, I found myself inevitably pursuing just the opposite. After experiencing so many summers in a row, I ended up, quite literally, seeking darkness. Sometimes rather desperately.
The details were that I was following along a thru-hike in New Zealand. Te Araroa—New Zealand’s longest trail—which I tramped my way along from last October through February. Peak summertime in the southern hemisphere. Long summer days filled with ample sunshine in New Zealand’s high latitudes. And I was outside camping for all of it.
In spite of this, I began to seek out the darkness like a nocturnal animal. Though backpacking and camping itself are most practically done during daylight hours, my sleep schedule shifted to be more night-oriented. I was desperately craving the dark. Always an early-bird before, I instead felt the pull to become a night owl.
My daily hiking routine was far different from most other trampers. I would lollygag and nap my way through the afternoon’s hiking route—I never felt in a rush to get anywhere—and this resulted in a delayed arrival at the campsite or hut later in the evening. Daily chores of setting up camp and cooking dinner would take me even later into the evening hours. While nearly all my hiking compatriots would be in bed sleeping before sundown, I would continue to stay awake. At the fall of nighttime, I would feel a sense of relief. Reawakened, reinvigorated by the dark, I would remain conscious. I was enlivened again. Aside from a little bit of stargazing, seeking out glowworms, or swimming with bioluminescent algae, I tended to not explore much after dark. Instead, I cocooned. I would cozy up in my tent or in the hut. I would read or journal. Or, failing that, I would just lie awake and think. My mind was becoming clear and active. It was no time for sleep.
Delayed bedtimes from my nighttime activities resulted in delayed mornings. Late nights meant later waking times, and increasingly later starts to the hiking day. My daily routine of wake-hike-camp-sleep kept creeping later and later into the day. I got into an inefficient (by thru-hiker standards) pattern of waking around 10 or 11am, leaving camp by noon or later, and arriving at the next camp just before sundown (or, in some cases, after sunset). I started setting up my camp and cooking dinner exclusively by the wane light of a headlamp. And since I never wanted to go to sleep immediately after making camp, I continued to stay awake after dinner reading and journaling by the dim glow of a red light. The spiral of becoming more nocturnal continued.
Keeping this kind of sleep schedule meant that upon waking in the morning, nearly always everyone else at the huts or campsites had already departed. I would thus be greeted by a peaceful morning of blissful solitude in a beautiful location. Upon arriving at the next hut or campsite the following evening, I found most of its occupants would already be in bed, or pretty darn near to it. A direct result was that I started talking less and less to my fellow Te Araroa trampers. I became a temporal recluse. I embraced the quietness and seclusion that night offered, and I basked in this new-found introverted time.
In essence, I think what I was craving was not the darkness itself, but something that the dark provided. Nighttime can facilitate certain events and emotions that the daytime cannot do justice. Darkness sets a certain mood and ambiance, and that was what I had been craving for so long.
Summer seasons, with their long days and ample light, play host to social gatherings and long adventurous outings in the outdoors. Summer is an externally-focused season, with an emphasis on travel, exploration, and sociality. Winter seasons, in contrast, play host to a quieter, more subdued, more introspective disposition. The darkness closes off the self to much of one’s surroundings—the world becomes more limited, and the internal self begins to take focus. The snug coziness of one’s safe protected domicile on a dark winter’s day offers a feeling of security that cannot be matched by the bright and benign summer. From this position, one can look inwards at oneself, reflect, grow, introspect.
With so many summers in a row under my belt, I think my body and soul were craving that dark introspective rest period to relax and mentally digest all my recent experiences. Leading up to Te Araroa, I had undergone many long adventurous summer days of travel, socializing and exploration—a summer guiding canoe trips in the Boundary Waters, a summer working at a research station in Antarctica, an entire summer spent leading a backpacking trip on the arctic tundra of Alaska. Then to top it all off, I started on this long endeavor of a thru-hike on New Zealand’s longest trail. All this movement and exploration simply became too much for my own desires. Instead, I was craving a more relaxed pace—just to have some time to sit and process through everything I had done while the days were long and my thirst for adventure was high.
Personally, I find myself quite cognizant and responsive to the change in seasons. I grew up in a temperate climate. The places I call home are marked by a strong seasonality from summer into winter and back again. Furthermore, I have chosen to pursue a career as a seasonal worker in the outdoor industry, where the arc of my year follows the progression of the seasons—and I am outdoors witnessing the changes for most of it. In the temperate climates I call home, there is a distinct period of rapid growth and activity, followed by a period of rest and dormancy.
The plants in the temperate landscapes where I grew up have adapted to this seasonal cycle. In fact, many cannot live well or reproduce if the hard winter cycle is broken. Buds fail to open, flowers fail to bloom, seeds fail to germinate. The changes in the plants’ metabolism are triggered by changes in light and cold—processes known as cold stratification and vernalization. As a plant connoisseur, I am in-tune with the plants around me. And similar to the plants, I need these seasonal cycles for my own healthy biology.
There was only one other time in my life where I felt acutely the lack of change in seasons. It was the first time I had ever skipped a winter, opting to spend October through April in Australia instead of in the northern hemisphere. Coming back to America the following summer, I felt like something wasn’t quite right. I felt like I had missed that vital internal reset period that feels so intrinsic to my nature.
Now, as summer has officially started and the solstice has passed, darkness will ever so slowly return to the northern hemisphere. This time, I am staying put in the north for the foreseeable future. Darkness, and all it brings, will finally come to me. No longer will I have to stay up so late desperately seeking darkness. I will finally get the strong seasonal reset period that my body and mind have been craving. It may be the height of summer now, but I’m already looking forward to winter.
Chasing Light
It seems I’ve been chasing light lately. First an Austral Summer below the Antarctic Circle. Then a Boreal summer above the Arctic circle. In a few day’s time, shortly after the autumnal equinox has ushered in fall to the northern hemisphere, I will board a plane and fly back to the southern hemisphere for the start of spring. I seem to have become a season hopper.
With three summers in a row without a winter season in between, you’d be forgiven if you thought I was chasing warmth and sunshine instead of chasing daylight. Though astronomically speaking, the seasons have been summer, traditional ‘summer’ weather has been neither what I was seeking or have experienced. Last December I spent the solstice in Antarctica, though even the peak of summer there felt climactically akin to my brethren at home in the Midwest. This June, I was in northern Alaska for the solstice. Yes, temperatures could rise and be unbearable under the full, circling, blazing sun—but it could also become cloudy and reach temperatures within the range of snowfall. Indeed, though the daylight has indicated summertime, these summer seasons haven’t always seemed particularly ‘summery.’
And here I go again, back to New Zealand, back to the southern hemisphere, and back into another summer season. It wasn’t by design that this happened—circumstances and the development of life decisions just produced this unintended result. While working in Antarctica last October through February, I met someone who convinced me to join her on a thru-hike on New Zealand’s Te Araroa trail. So, while the days are short and the snow falls in the northern hemisphere, I will be on the other side of the globe chasing the warmth and summer season as we hike the island together. As we follow the trail from north to south, we will be reaching higher and higher latitudes where in summer the days become longer and the nights are short.
In the temperate mid-latitudes where New Zealand lies, the distinction between periods of night and day are pronounced, but not extreme. But life, as well as the landscape, reaches towards the extreme the more one goes poleward. And beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles, the land goes from 24-hour sunlight in the summer to 24-hour darkness in the winter. The polar regions are places of extreme seasonal differences. The summer season knows not the winter season, and the transition between the two is abrupt with only truncated springs and falls. From the sun circling overhead continually in the summer, there is only a short transition until the suns sets and never peaks above the horizon in winter.
I have seen firsthand the way the sun wanders aimlessly around the polar summer sky, circumambulating. At McMurdo Station, Antarctica, 77.5 degrees south, I spent 118 days without a sunset. When it finally did occur, the first sunset of the fall was a momentous occasion. The residents of McMurdo piled outside to watch as their faithful sun companion dipped briefly below the horizon, only to rise less than an hour later. And though the sun had officially set, it was far from night, and would be for quite some time. In the beginning of fall, the sun stays so close to the horizon that it remains civil twilight for hours after sunset. Not until a month and a half after the first sunset of the fall does McMurdo experience its first true minutes of night.
With traditional distinctions between day and night becoming muddled at the poles, day and night become somewhat irrelevant. How is one to tell the passage of time when one cannot tell when one day slips into the next? In summer, the sky remains constantly lit. Day rolled into night, but the night seemed just like the day.
In Antarctica, during the summer season, I ended up working the night shift at McMurdo Station. Though the 24-hour clock that the research station ran on considered the shift to be ‘nighttime’, there was no darkness. The only indicator of night was that the throngs of researchers and science support staff hanging out in the galley would slowly subside; there would be a few hours of peaceful quiet while the station slept, until folks began to roll into the galley for coffee and breakfast at the start of another workday. Meanwhile, in those quiet hours in the wee of the morning, the sun was at its lowest angle on the horizon, sending in radiant beams of light through the bank of galley windows—a middle of the night golden hour.
I had no problem adjusting to working the night shift after spending my first few weeks on station as a daytime worker—the sun was as bright as always, and I did not feel like I was sleeping away and wasting daylight as I had felt when I worked overnights for big-box retail. Inside my windowless McMurdo dorm room, the lights were always off. When I needed nighttime, I could retreat to my room and sleep soundly out of the sun. But were I to choose to go out and play instead, the sunlight would be my constant companion.
I had more experience living under the midnight sun this summer, as I led a 50-day backpacking trip north of the Arctic Circle to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Our latitude was not quite as high as McMurdo—only at 69 degrees latitude—thus the extremes of sunlight were not as pronounced. But what this trip to Alaska lacked in sheer latitude, it made up for in intensity of experience. Gone were the modern conveniences of McMurdo Station. There was no longer any indoors to hide in, no eternally dark dorm room or dimly-lit dark bar to retreat to. Instead, we were out in the backcountry with no more than we could carry upon our backs. Our only shelter was a thin-walled tent, and the daylight filtered right in. We either made friends with our eyemasks, or we learned to sleep in the light. Once again, the time of day became irrelevant—there was no hiding from the constant presence of the sun.
It took a number of days before I lost the nagging feeling that comes after looking at the late hour on my watch and feeling the pressure to get a hustle on to make camp before darkness falls. Throughout the duration of the trip, I kept tabs of the time on my watch—not out of necessity, but more out of a curiosity of how our circadian rhythms were adapting. Our days slowly dragged out to be longer, as we stayed up later enjoying each other’s company and slept in longer the following mornings. Thus, we ended up being awake through the darkest hours of the day, and even towards the end of the trip after the sun had been setting below the horizon, the light remained with us. Even in the depth of night on our last day in the Wildlife Refuge, it remained light enough in the tent to read a book.
In spite of the mounting fatigue from daylight that comes with constant exposure to lightness, I appreciated the daylight as a benign and amiable companion in a remote and unfamiliar terrain. Here we were, traveling for weeks in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where wolves and grizzly bears roam wild. The signs of these animals were all over—tracks, scat, kill-sites. But the daylight made the wilderness seem friendlier. All told, we saw six wolves and seven grizzly bears on the trip. Seeing the bears and watching their natural disinterested movements in the daylight provided much more psychological comfort for us than wondering if out in the darkness somewhere was a bear lurking just outside the tent.
At about the same time on the trip that I began to miss the creature comforts of home—dry feet and doorways instead of tent zippers—I also began to miss the darkness. Aside from being able to sleep better in the darkness, I began to miss darkness not for darkness itself, but for what it brings to us. The constant daylight drowns out the stars all polar summer long. I’m constantly reminded that people forget this, as I am asked quite often if I saw great stars or aurora. Unfortunately, I was able to see neither stars nor aurora, much to the disappointment of my star-gazing self. And too, having the darkness creep in at the end of the day provides a natural daily cycle of gathering in your shelter for rest. Darkness too, lends itself to gathering around a campfire for light and warmth. Though we did have a campfire on the riverbank one night in Alaska, the magic of the fire just wasn’t the same in the light hours.
As much as I began to miss the darkness, when it finally did come, it felt uncomfortable and foreign. Towards the end of our trip, the nights had been gradually growing dimmer. But right after leaving the Wildlife Refuge, we caught a shuttle ride to Fairbanks, which sits below the Arctic Circle. Darkness descended upon us as we camped in Fairbanks that night. For the first time in nearly two months, it was no longer light enough outside to walk around without a headlamp. The feeling was unfamiliar. Suddenly all the scary feelings of darkness came rushing back in that gut-wrenching primordial fear of the unknown. My how easy it is to forget what darkness is like!
This coming summer, the distinction between day and night will not be as pronounced as I hike the Te Araroa as it was when I spent time closer to the poles. The mid-latitudes will provide a kinder balance of light and darkness each day. Nevertheless, as fall and winter begin to descend on the northern hemisphere, I will once again be off chasing light.
In All Directions 