58. The Longest Day in Cardiff

Did my heart skip a beat? I was watching the setting sun and it was more north than west. Had the earth tumbled off its axis? It was worrisome, but I had worked it out by the time the longest day of the year arrived.

As summer approached, looking through the living room window of our flat, which faces the north, I could still see dusk behind the cityscape of Cardiff. My brain thought it was looking west because I am accustom to such a sky being only in the west. I had lived my entire life at a lower latitude. Even after eleven o’clock at night in Wales, a dark blue sky persisted behind the city. I had never seen that before and it was upsetting me.

I pride myself on my sense of direction and an ability to navigate by the sky. It used to be I could look at the sun and, knowing the time, I would know which way was which. This training began in my parents’ house in Pennsylvania. The large window in my bedroom faced west and served as part of my education. Windows are wonderful.

For example, in that wonderful window in Pennsylvania, an enormous spider had appeared. I named the spider Charlie, disregarding the likelihood she was female. She crafted a perfect web that partially draped the window in an attenuated doily. Double-glazing gave me the courage to examine Charlie closely, from inches away, with a magnifying glass. She reappeared regularly for days. I observed how she strung her trap, how from the hub she touched silk strands that extended into a network. When an insect struck, she turned in that direction and focused on that one thread. When vibrations indicated a catch trying to escape, Charlie raced to the first fork in the network and paused if the vibrations had stopped. She waited with a leg on each strand for more vibrations, then sped along the singing strand. Charlie could find her prey quickly so long as it was struggling to escape. I watched her fangs stab the victim to inject paralyzing poison and digestive juices, eventually to dissolve the contents of the exoskeletal lunchbox. She wrapped her lunch in a silken robe so it couldn’t escape before turning into a meal. That window was as entertaining as watching an HD nature program by David Attenborough on a flat-screen television, which was many years away.

That window also provided a study of the macro world. I lived in that room for many years. Because it faced west and the setting sun, I noticed the sun did not set in the same place. It progressed along the western horizon, more to the right as summer approached and to the left during the approach of winter. But for all intents and purposes, it was always somewhere in the west. I had the idea of painting crosshairs on the outside glass. Then, every few days at sunset, I would mark with a dot on the inside glass where the sun appeared to set through the crosshairs. It was an idea I never got around to putting into application, yet it served as empirical evidence for my evolving understanding of the earth’s tilt.

That appreciation was further advanced when I was living in New York City. I followed the same route every day to the buying offices of Sears, Roebuck & Co. where I was employed as a file-clerk. Every morning I came out of the subway at the same time and would noticed the rising sun greeting me from a slightly different place as I climbed the staircase to the street. The light of the sun progressively met me further down the staircase. Then there was the sculpture on Fifth Avenue.

The sculpture was a giant metal triangle. It was set up to have each of the three sides point to the sun at noon on four specific days of the year. The short end pointed at the summer solstice, when at noon the sun is highest over Manhattan. The longest side pointed at the sun at noon during either equinox. The base aimed at the winter solstice sun at noon. The “Sun Triangle” was designed by geophysicist and oceanographer Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus. So simple, yet it was a key for New Yorkers to comprehending our orbiting planet while living and working in the city’s canyons from which it is hard to view the sky. I made several pilgrimages to that sculpture during my New York City life. After that, the paths of the sun and moon, and the phases of the moon, were better understood by me as I continued my empirical observations.

Years later, I was again living in my parents’ house, only now it was my house. I was living there with Ms Keogh, my cherished companion, and our two kids. My lessons continued, but no longer from the bedroom window which now belonged to our son. It came from reading the sky during the day, but especially at night when the atmosphere is transparent. It came as a result of regularly walking Boris, our Newfoundland dog, because no one else in the family was willing to take him for regular walks. The skill I acquired from those walks helped me to navigate. The sky and time of day served me well on adventures locally and three times across the continent. However, I never wandered significant beyond my latitude. Now I am living in Britain, which is so far north that I felt lost as the days grew longer. The longest day in Cardiff is more than an hour and a half longer than it is in Philadelphia. The skies of Wales were baffling until I was rescued by John Lewis.

John Lewis is a British  chain of department stores and we live within a ten minute walk of their Cardiff branch. Visiting the store, I found myself among the globes. I used to have a globe when I lived in Pennsylvania, and if only I had that globe in Wales, I would have understood quicker, but it was too much of a bother to bring with me across the Atlantic. But now one presented itself for study in John Lewis, tilted on its axis, and I could position it with a distant ceiling lamp. With the planet earth at hand, I could again grasp how the sun's location would appear off-kilter. When the evening of the longest day of the year arrived, the summer solstice, I looked out our north-facing living room window and could see the fading light somewhere in the direction of Greenland. It was not the Apocalypse.