How Long Is a Day?

Return to the West, II: How Long Is a Day?

Information on times for sunrise and sunset are readily available for any intersection of latitude and longitude, for any day of the year, but clock times given don’t take into account trees, hills, mountains, or canyons. Here in Michigan, someone living deep in the woods, west of a high, wooded ridge will experience sunrise much later than a Lake Huron shoreline dweller. Dark comes earlier in the woods, too. The beginning and end of a Michigan day are gradual, anyway, even along the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, often with subtle, soft edges and muted tints.

Desert and mountain sunrises and sunsets are more tropical – at least, from what I’ve read of the tropics. They are not, except on the occasional cloudy morning or evening, long drawn-out affairs. The sky grows light before the sun itself appears, but once up that sun is anything but subtle. So, too, when it drops below the western horizon at day’s end, dark is a sudden presence. (Absence of light = presence of dark.)

On this spring Sunday in northern Michigan, with cold, grey skies promising a gloomy day, precipitation probable, I remember very different mornings, those of our ghost town cabin in the high desert. In Dos Cabezas, if I woke when the sky was still dark, the lights of distant houses and ranches winked against the blackness, as they had the evening before. Slowly, then, gradually, unrelieved blackness would give way to indistinct, shadowy hills. At first the mountains were more suspicion than reality, themselves untrustworthy, but when at last the sun set fire to the mountain horizon the light would be instantly implacable, flat and white and pitiless, and the reality of the mountains revealed – falsely, of course, as we know from geology lessons -- as immutable.

After a night cold enough to make gas heat welcome in the cabin, morning remained cool enough that I habitually wore a heavy, rough suede jacket lined with wool fleece for the day’s initial sortie, a walk with my dog down into the dry wash. The Philadelphia Wash, one of the neighbors called it. Like rivers and creeks in Michigan, the washes in Arizona have names, though it is generally only the locals who know them. In summer storms dangerous torrents of water from the mountains rush through: in winter only patterns in the sand show where water sometimes flows. The wash was easier walking than the desert itself, because beyond the wash one must thread carefully through mesquite and catclaw (jacket and boots necessary protection), and the ground throughout our part of Dos Cabezas was littered with strands and pieces of rusty barbed wire, rusty old tin cans, and all kinds of broken glass, remnants of an old dump as well as the ghost town itself, with wire fences strung to keep cows out of various parcels of property.

Down in the dry wash, in midwinter, where frost inhabited shaded areas until they were reached by sunlight, morning’s bird was the pyruloxxia, Arizona’s “silver cardinal,” singing from bare branches of leafless winter scrub oaks. The color palette of the winter high desert was limited to dusty browns and greys and grey-greens, relieved only by the bright green of creosote bush. Day or night, the smell was of dust. Sometimes, also, if they were near the cabin, there was the living fragrance of cows. The creosote bush, if brushed against, had its own strong smell, of course, but the primary smells were, first dust, second cows.

(Later in the season, furry leaves of the little bajada lupine, a beautiful flower at close range but low and small enough to be easily overlooked, offered drops of dew, held carefully like transparent glass beads. Tiny, delicate toadflax and stands of frail desert leeks, both with heavenly light-blue flowers, cast slender shadows on the ground. Primrose opened wide to the morning, some yellow, others almost white but lightly tinted pink. None of the early spring blooms of the high desert are large or showy. All are shy and close to the ground, living, it seems, on the scant moisture from morning dew.)

The heat of midday brought with it the illusion that the afternoon sun stood unchanging for hours, but spending those hours around the cabin dispelled the illusion, demonstrating by movement of shade that the sun too was moving across the cloudless sky. The front steps, facing south, however, were always in full sun, the tiny back deck, under an extension of the roof, looking off to the Cabezas, always shaded.

Every morning my first self-appointed task was to make coffee. As soon as darkness began to leak away, I would begin opening venetian blinds -- those on the east opened last and never all the way, because David liked to stay in bed later, the two west windows and one north over the sink all the way as soon as the sun was up.

Windows and blinds facing south were most judiciously and gradually adjusted, slats tilted to let in light but guard privacy (although the road was some distance from the cabin), the tilt monitored and changed little by little until finally maximum light streamed in. Before we left for the day’s adventures, however, we closed those south blinds tight, for while morning’s warmth was comforting, a full afternoon of sunlight would have turned the small cabin into an oven by later in the day.

When we came home in late afternoon, we would slide a few windows open from the bottom and open the south blinds partway, on a slant, permitting evening air to circulate until sunset (which came on early in January and gradually later as the weeks went by), when I closed all windows and blinds tight again, this time to hold in whatever of the day’s heat remained. As the season advanced, we also took to leaving the heavy front and back doors of the cabin open in the evenings so that air might pass through the cabin by way of the screen doors, taking away the heat of the day.

During the day, a large mirror above the gas heater faced the front door, and the mirror would reflect and intensify the south light in the cabin’s interior. There was no excluding the sun. Even with the blinds fully closed, the days were awash in light. Meanwhile, monitoring and adjusting light and air through windows and blinds was an integral part of each desert day’s ritual, and I relished the task, set for me by the sun and mountains rather than by any capricious human mandate.

At night, against the endless black of the sky, the shining stars far outnumbered those even in our northern Michigan sky, while cows continued to shuffle around the cabin, grazing in the dark. Off in the distance rose a coyote chorus, sounding much farther from the cabin than our northern Michigan coyotes sound from our old farmhouse, where they seem to be serenading us from below our bedroom window, though it’s doubtful they are any closer than the willow-lined creek. 

Stars and coyotes in the high desert – so familiar, so like home, and yet reminding us constantly that we were somewhere else, very far from home.