Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 14: Let There Be Light

Posted December 29, 2006 by James E. Nelson

One of the most common questions I get about Alaska concerns the winter darkness. Let me begin this chapter by clearing up a misconception: It wasn’t quite that dark in Delta. On the shortest days of the year we still got a couple hours of sunlight (the sun above the horizon) and four to six hours of daylight. That being said, the cycle of darkness and light was one of the most significant and intrusive realities of life in interior Alaska.

Delta is well below the Arctic Circle. One has to be north of the Arctic Circle to experience a day when the sun never rises nor sets, depending on the season. As I said, where we were, the sun made its appearance for just over two hours on the shortest day of the year and did it’s disappearing act for the same amount of time at the end of June. But the angle of movement is also very low that far north. At it’s highest, the sun is never very high in the sky. Rather than passing over the top of your head, it skirts the horizon. In June and July the sun rises in the north-northeast and sets in the north-northwest. In it’s twenty plus hours of being visible it seems to move south, make it’s way across the southern horizon and then move north again. Similarly, once it drops below the horizon (or before it comes up in the morning), there is an extended period of dawn and dusk. It is therefore not particularly helpful, when trying to understand daylight and darkness, to think in terms of sunrise and sunset. A different frame of reference is required.

Let’s first consider summer. The stars disappeared sometime in late April or early May and didn’t reappear until late August. For over three months life was made up of either daylight or dusk Second, let’s consider the length of days. Each day either lengthened or shortened by about seven minutes in Delta. That means that if the sun rose at 10:00 a.m. one spring Sunday morning. The next Sunday it would rise at 10:20. If the sun set at 6:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening in the Fall while you were shooting hoops, it would set at 5:35 the next Wednesday. Moving sunrise and sunset between 3½ and 4 minutes every day doesn’t seem overly dramatic, but it was very noticeable on a weekly basis. Third, consider winter. On the shortest day of the year the sun rose about 11:30 and set a bit after 1:30. (Because the Alaska Range was so high on the southern horizon, the daylight was shorter than what the astronomical timetables said.) It started getting light around 9:00 a.m. and by 4:00 it was completely dark. That means that if you worked a nine to five job and weren’t able to get out of the building for lunch, you didn’t see sunlight for several weeks around Christmas time, except on weekends.

We moved to Alaska in July, but the never-ending sunlight wasn’t as big a shock to us as it was to people who fly into Fairbanks from Seattle or Minneapolis. We drove from Lincoln, Nebraska to Delta. The trip took us over a week. Each day the sun set later and rose earlier. The change was much more gradual. We tented on the trip north. Somewhere in British Columbia we went to sleep in the light out and woke up early the next morning and was still light outside the tent. It was still an amazing thing to be bathed in so much sunlight. It was the sunrises and sunsets that were the most dramatic on our move. As we got into the big mountain country of British Columbia, the golden mountain tops at sunrise and sunset were not only dramatic, they seemingly lasted forever. In Montana or Colorado, if you wanted a great mountain sunset picture, with all the pinks, purples, and golds, you had a window of opportunity that only lasted a few short minutes. The farther north we got, the longer the sunsets lasted (because of the angle of the sun). It was glorious.

People tend to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and then not get up until very late in the Interior. I discovered that it was pointless to try to do any pastoral work before 10:00 a.m. and it was better to wait until after lunch. Unless they had to be somewhere at 9:00 a.m. (and an amazing number of Alaskans had nowhere that they had to be in the summer), they were probably still in their pajamas (if they were even out of bed) if you stopped by in the morning. On the other hand, some of my pastoral calls didn’t start until 11:00 p.m. in the summer. It was not unusual for me to be out after midnight. That was simply how that society worked.

Since neither Brenda nor I had to be indoors all day during the winter we found that the long Alaska winters didn’t bother us too much. (Having banks of overhead fluorescent lights that almost blinded us in every room of the house also helped—there’s nothing like living in a commercial building.) Winter days may have been short, but they were generally brilliantly bright. The interior’s wet season ran from mid July to the end of the year. In turn the sky was, more often than not, cloudless and crystal clear from January through June. With all the snow on the ground reflecting the sunlight the winter days after Christmas through Spring were glorious, albeit short.

And as an aside for all you tourists considering a trip to Alaska. The biggest complaint I hear is that people don’t get to see Denali (Mt. McKinley) because it’s shrouded in clouds every time they go to see it. The busiest six weeks of the tourist season is the last half of July and the month of August, which is also the rainy season. If you want to see Denali and the Alaska Range in all their frozen glory, go to Alaska in June. Your chances of seeing the mountain peaks are much better then since it is toward the end of the dry season.

For both Brenda and I, summers were much more difficult than winters. We never got enough sleep because of the eternal sunlight. Being drowsy throughout the day, we also tended to get grumpy. Furthermore, since we didn’t own four wheelers and power boats, we were limited in our summer activities. Autumn was hands-down our favorite season with Spring and Winter coming in a close tie second. We more or less put up with summers.

The cycle of light and dark also affected holidays. There was no point in fireworks on Independence Day, for instance. You would hear the bang but not a lot else. The first part of July also tended to be very hot in the Tanana Valley so people made their way to the mountains or the coast for the holiday. Delta was very empty on July 4. It is very different seven months later. February’s a tough month in interior Alaska. Although the days are getting longer, it’s still very dark. February is also one of the coldest months. It’s a time of year when cabin fever is beginning to set in and everyone is looking for something to do. Every town has their big late winter extravaganza and in Delta it was the “Festival of Lights” complete with a fireworks display.

The Festival begins late afternoon Friday with a parade. It’s a standard small town parade with the school cheerleaders, floats, the band, and exhibit cars. Of course the band is ridiculously out of tune because the instruments are cold. Reeds don’t work very well at -20°, so the clarinets and saxophones squeak (although they tended to that at their indoor concerts too). The cheerleaders, rather than being bouncy, bare-legged beauties, were bundled up in parkas and bunny boots, riding on the back of a trailer or trudging along the side of a float. And it was hard to see the floats because, even though it was early evening, it was dark. Rather than flowers, many of them featured strings of blinking, multi-colored lights.

After the parade people divided up, some going to the bar and some going to the Presbyterian Church for the annual public Korean dinner. On that night the Koreans made fistfuls of money, and I assume the bar on the other end of town did as well. Festival of Lights was the occasion of the bar’s annual oyster feed. Fresh oysters were flown in from the coast and patrons could have oysters fixed just about any way imaginable.

As the food and libations began to wind down, everyone made their way back to the high school for the fire works display. Some people stayed in their cars, but most everyone braved temperatures that normally were ten to twenty degrees below zero, huddled together, and oohed and ahhed like it was the Fourth of July in some Midwest small town.

Saturday morning all eyes were on the big parking lot in the center of town for the dog pull. Dog sledding is the better known dog sport in Alaska, but two other sports are extremely popular among the locals: skijorring and dog pulls. In skijorring, a harnessed dog pulling a skier races other such teams. Skijorring tournaments are generally held at golf courses and since the local golf course was inconveniently far from town, this sport did not figure into Delta’s spectator sporting life. The Festival of Lights Dog Pull, on the other hand, was one of the big pulls in the state of Alaska, drawing champion dogs from across the state as well as Yukon Territory (it wasn’t yet a Province when we lived there) and British Columbia.

A dog pull is pretty much what it sounds like. Dogs are attached to a sled with heavy weights. There are categories for who can pull the farthest, the heaviest, and the fastest. There was even a well known team of dachshunds that were there every year showing off their pulling skills. (They were usually around for the preliminary day of the Iditarod in Anchorage and the Yukon Quest in Fairbanks—a dozen dachshunds pulling a small sled around the streets of town. They never won any medals, but there weren’t any dogs in attendance that had more heart.

After the Festival of Lights the weather typically remained absolutely frigid, but the days grew longer and the sun sparkled off the frost-encrusted trees. People began to get out of the house a bit more. It was this time of year that the sled dog racing season began in earnest. With the coming of the light, the ice fisherman also flocked to the frozen lakes. Sportsmen would begin to wander into the local sports shop looking at new reels, rods, compound bows, and rifles, looking forward to another fishing and hunting season just around the corner.

What the rest of America calls Spring, Alaskans call “break up.” It is a messy and difficult time of year. As the weather warms the snow begins to melt and a few weeks later the ground begins to thaw. The result is mud. Even the best engineered parking lots suffer from drainage problems because of where the giant piles of snow were located. Pants quickly get dirty from all the running water and mud. People without rubber boots inevitably spend the rest of the day in wet shoes. All things being equal, it would be the most miserable season of the year. But the cycle of darkness and light has begun all over again. The days are now getting longer by approximately twenty minutes a week. After the winter darkness, the light and relative warmth make people long to be outside. Hunting and fishing (except for ice fishing) are in truth still a long way away, but the sensibilities are controlled, not by the temperature nor the firmness of the ground; rather, it is the light that drives this movement out of the house and into the sports shops.

In the end, it is the light of the lengthening days of Spring that make the challenging life of the far north bearable. Even though warm weather, dry trails, and ice free rivers are more than a month away, the lengthening days make this a season of great hope. Many of the European theologians who suffered through the two world wars emphasize the hope of the resurrection. What Jesus’ resurrection brought about was not the reality of world peace, but rather it’s real possibility. In turn, what the church offers is not to fix the problems of the world, but rather offers a solution to those problems that can be worked through with time. From an eternal perspective, the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ mark the victory over sin and death. But from the perspective of the here and now, Easter is not the victory, but rather the guarantee that it is coming. A favorite World War II image of Easter, for the European theologians, was D-Day. That assault marked the decisive turn in the war, but the war was far from over. D-Day was less about victory and more about hope.

This vision of Easter had been largely a theological curiosity to me through seminary and through my first decade of ministry. It suddenly took on a much more profound meaning upon celebrating Easter in Alaska. Outdoor sunrise services are done between the snow banks of a cemetery still frozen solid and plowed out especially for this occasion. (Bodies are necessarily stored over the winter and burials won’t begin for another couple of months, so no one has even been in the cemetery since October and other than the Easter service, no one will return until late May or early June.) Easter lilies can be flown in from far away, but are completely out of place on a frigid and snow-packed, but sun-drenched, Easter morning.

Easter, in Alaska, is really a celebration of light, not of Spring. The hope of Spring (warm weather) is still a long way off but the promise of Spring shines down in the sunlight and longer days. Waking up on Easter morning knowing the temperature might barely break above freezing and the landscape outside the door is buried under several feet of snow would be deeply discouraging to most Americans, but in Alaska, the land of darkness and light, the cold and snow are overlooked because of the glories of the sun rising upon a new day and pointing ahead toward a new season of life and growth.

I began with a caveat. In the darkest day of winter, it wasn’t quite that dark. But on a bright spring morning near the time of the Spring Equinox, the day was indeed that bright. Light arising from the midst of the darkness made the mud and run off all worth it. Let there be light!