Palm Beach Florida Weekly

The summer line

COMMENTARY



 

 

Summer rolled in this week on Tuesday with its official solstice papers, its passport, if you will: that the planet’s 23.5-degree lean on its axis — one of the few things about our world that never changes — guarantees a sun appearing at its highest elevation of the year, at noon, over the Tropic of Cancer.

Simple, isn’t it?

Well, no, but let me attempt to explain — and since you’re blithely entering summer this week the way some people blithely enter Miami, I think you should know how it works.

Say you’re dancing with a partner. And leaning toward him or her. And your job is to dance a vaguely elliptical circle around your partner while he remains stationary — but you have to maintain the same angle of lean all the way around. On one side of the circle, therefore, you’ll be leaning toward him at an angle of 23.5 degrees. But on the other side, if you maintain the same angle of lean, you’ll be leaning away from him.

That’s all it is. Except one circle would take 365 days, and for each one of those you’d have to turn completely around yourself, once, in 24 hours.

Thus days, weeks, months, and years of seasons slide through us, each one a chance to celebrate something unique in the world.

Especially summer seasons. So here you are dancing around the sun. On June 21, and in fact for the next few days, the noontime angle of the sun overhead — over the Tropic of Cancer, which happens to be 23.5 degrees latitude north of the equator — is roughly the same. These are the longest days of the year in the northern hemisphere, with the shortest nights, a time of sun splash.

In Key West on Tuesday, the sun rose at 6:38 a.m. and set at 8:18 p.m., giving the southernmost point in the continental U.S., positioned at 24.55 degrees north latitude, a mere 13 hours and 40 minutes of sun-above-the-horizon daylight.

In Naples, Fort Myers and Palm Beach, meanwhile, all positioned at latitudes of just over 26 degrees north, we got 13:46, 13:49 and 13 hours and 50 minutes of direct sunlight, while in Punta Gorda, at roughly 29.93 degrees north, we also got 13:50 of sunlight. But it started and ended eight minutes later than it did in Palm Beach.

Tallahassee, meanwhile — much closer to the North Pole at 30.43 degrees north — got a whopping 14 hours and 6 minutes of direct sunlight, which has never helped the politicians see any better, necessarily, but always provided extra time for long summer parties.

And none of that compares even remotely with Utqiagvik (once called Barrow), Alaska, the nation’s northernmost city, lying at 72.29 degrees north. There, the 4,000 or so whale- and seal-hunting Americans in residence get 24 hours of daylight, every day, for more than 70 of those summer days.

Don’t plan to escape your shadow there, in summer.

To execute that cool move, however — we’re all haunted by some long shadows of our own making we’d do well to escape — we have a broad range of choices, all of them lying along The Tropic of Cancer, as we call it. This is the summer line, and as it turns out a model or map for our future, if we’re going to survive our present.

The Tropic of Cancer happens to run through Mexico, the Bahamas, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and southern China, representing sometimes wildly divergent cultures, which have nothing to do with summer itself. The summer line gives us a lot of choices, however, if we’re fleeing our shadows, our old ways of doing things as humans. Get to any one of those places on the longest day of the year, or even a few days before and after it, and we can become almost shadowless at noon, as long as we don’t look at our feet. And good dancers tend to avoid that.

In this cycle of summers — and winters, of course, where places like Utqiagvik go dark, with no sunrise at all for more than 70 days — we humans are only just beginning to learn to share our summers with each other. Not to mention the other seasons.

Here’s what I mean. People have been growing food or raising it in one place for only about 10,000 to 12,000 years. It’s not a lot of time for the likes of us. We’ve had only that many summer solstices to share in communities, so far. And now there’s no room on the Earth for nomadic ways of life, the ones that may have existed before farming when people could just wander away from other people. So we’re forced to share our summers. And everything else.

There’s no room anymore on the summer line for tribal or national myopia, for single-vision claims of identity and behaviors that exclude or damage other people. We can’t wander away from each other anymore. The summer line points the way to a new world, a world connected by a very human compulsion to protect the planet and the humans on it.

It’s a compulsion traditionally at odds with other human compulsions, obviously. But humans will have to act on this particular compulsion alone, dancing all the way around the summer line, if we’re to survive as a species.

That’s what our latitudinal maps should tell us now, both here and in the southern hemisphere, where the Tropic of Capricorn connects such varied nations as Australia, South Africa and Argentina.

None of us breathing today will likely live to see the new world, but we can help make it happen by celebrating not just summer, but the summer line. ¦

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