Day Length

Our home in Papagayos rests south of the Tropic of Cancer. In the summer the sun passes north of being directly overhead at mid-day, but the day lengths vary only about an hour through the annual cycle of seasons with the average day about twelve hours long. Nearly equal amounts of daytime and nighttime.

During our visit in Fairbanks, Alaska, in early July we got to experience the "land of the mid-night sun." Actually, Fairbanks is a little bit south of the Arctic Circle, but the daylight to dusk cycle fills each day at mid-summer.

For some reason I awoke at 1:30 in the morning on July 6th. I peeked out of the closed blinds in our camper and I could still see the green of the cottonwood leaves and the grass nearby. All nature called me to walk to the Chena River that flows past our campground.

The thrushes chanted their mantra to call the sun back for another long-in-the-sky day. It was not the spiral song of the Vermont veery or the heartaching beauty of the wood thrush, but their own sweet Alaskan melody. The mosquitos dive bombed my head using my ears for bull's-eye targets. A fish jumped to catch an insect for breakfast in the swift tannin filled waters. Two gulls flew upstream in their sleek flight jackets in contrast with the ragged shoreline white spruce trees.

By 3:00 AM there was color rising in the eastern sky, a blush of rose, and the sky overhead was brightening to blue with the approach of morning. There was plenty of natural light to read and write without using electric lights. The smell of damp cottonwood filled all the space between the water's edge and our camper as I headed back to the screened refuge of our traveling home.