It’s dark. Too dark to see. The windows overlooking the south-forty (square yards) at the micro-farm are obsidian rectangles, framed in white. If I didn’t know there was a world out there, I wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s just before dawn on, this day of the winter solstice 2011, the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.

It’s seven-fifteen in the morning.

Jeez. Okay, I was expecting day length in Seattle to be a bit more variable than I was used to in the tropics, but come on, this is ridiculous. Today (now two days after the solstice if you’re reading this on Friday) there will be, get ready for it, something on the order of seventeen seconds more daylight than on the day of the actual solstice. Seventeen seconds. It’s been like this for weeks. In fact there are a full eighteen days in December where there are fewer than eight-and-a-half hours of sunlight a day.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. At this time of year the Sun is fully at the opposite, i.e. southernmost, end of its yearly travels. It rises as far to the southeast and sets as far to the southwest, as possible. It does this so remarkably quickly, right now, that it barely has time to gain enough altitude to clear the trees on the other side of the blueberry farm. Any sunbeams that make it over the trees are coming in only eighteen degrees off of horizontal.

The ironic thing is that lately the weather has been clear and crisp. Perfect dry weather – as usual – for going walking or whatever. But, by the time I have my coffee, take a shower, work a couple of hours, or whatever, it’s already growing dark.

And it’s three-forty-five in the afternoon.

Sure “sunset” – in the astro-meteorological sense – isn’t officially here for another thirty-six minutes, but the landscape is already dim because the Sun has dropped behind the trees, behind the scattered clouds, and behind the Olympic Mountains. This lack-of-daylight thing is worse than you can imagine. The word on the street, when you talk to people about sunny days, is: “You appreciate the sunshine so much . . .” I, without thinking, always appended “. . . because it rains so much” to that unfinished aphorism, but what they’re really saying is “. . . because it’s dark all the time”. It hasn’t rained here in a month, so every day has been the same; a beautiful sunrise over the Cascades followed by four hours or so of crisp sunny weather followed by a beautiful sunset over the Olympics followed by almost sixteen hours of night. Sixteen hours. It turns out to be remarkably difficult to have a sunny day when the Sun is always on the far side of the goddamned planet.

I decided to find out why.

As you no doubt remember from sixth grade science class, the Earth rotates every twenty-four hours around an axis that passes precisely – in a surprising coincidence – through both the North Pole and the South. You will also remember that this axis of rotation is tilted some twenty-three-and-a-half degrees relative to the Earth’s orbital plane. This tilt – or obliquity for the pedants among you – is what causes the Sun to appear to move higher and lower in the sky over the course of a year.

Astronomers trace the origin of this axial tilt to a date some four billion years ago when a celestial body the size of Mars crashed into Florida. The impact ejected out a mass of debris the size of the Pacific Ocean which then filled up with water and became, in another striking coincidence, the Pacific Ocean. The mass of ejecta went into orbit around the earth and slowly coalesced into the moon. The Earth was left a bit out of alignment. Thus, just by diverting one small planet, our Alien Overlords gave our newly seeded planet: tides from the moon, seasons from the axial tilt, and a celestial body close enough for not-yet-evolved clever people to deduce the laws of celestial mechanics thereby assuring that people would someday walk upon that same moon.

But I digress.

The upshot of this axial tilt is that the Sun is not always shining vertically down upon the equator but instead wanders through a wide swath around the middle of the Earth between parallels of latitude displaced 23°26’ north and south of the Equator. In the winter, during the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, the Sun shines straight down on the Tropic of Capricorn, while in the summer the Sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer during, if you can believe it, the zodiacal sign of Cancer. The area in between those two parallels of latitude is known, in one last serendipitous happenstance, as the tropics.

Now, the funny thing about the tropics is that the length of daylight doesn’t change very much. My two-year sojourn in the deep tropics never saw a day that varied more than an hour from twelve hours of light and twelve hours of night. It was during this time that I was finally able to comprehend the reason for the highly-varied length of day I experienced when I lived in places which had two more seasons than summer and next summer.

It goes something like this. The reason the seasonal variability of day length is only secondarily that the sun is shining down on the northern or southern tropics. Primarily, it is because when the sun is on the opposite side of the equator from you, there is more of planet Earth blocking your view.

Look at it this way. Two days ago the sun was shining straight down on a line at 23°26’ South latitude. For me to – in my imagination because I don’t want to hurt my eyes – look directly at the Sun I would have to peer through a large part of the planet for most of the day. That’s because the thick part of the planet, the tropics, where everybody from Seattle is vacationing right now, is in the way. In fact, the equator is working as a kind of horizon beyond which, you cannot see. At my current latitude of 47°40’ North, I pay for all that intervening rock with a day shortened to a mere eight-and-a-half hours. But just eleven-hundred miles north of here, an even larger burden of rock, despite the sun being ninety-three million miles out in space, blocks out daylight completely. Those poor dwellers of the Far North won’t get to see the sun for another three months.

I can’t imagine.

The flip-side of all this is that when the Sun moves north of the equator in March there will be progressively less and less of the Earth blocking the view, until such time next June when there will be nearly twice as much daylight as there is now.

But that’s not how it feels. That’s not how the human mind perceives things.

To help me get a grasp on this, my inner-scientist made the following graph. The purple line – read on the time scale on the left – is the time of sunrise. The blue line – to the same scale – is sunset. The jumps in those lines are due to daylight saving time kicking in or out. The red, smoothly sinusoidal, curve is the length of daylight and is read against the hours scale on the right. Right now we are on the leftmost edge of the graph.

That fat, green line is how long the day feels – the Perceived Length of Day. While the first three curves are scientifically derived, this green baby is just how it feels. Right now, it’s cold, dark most of the time, and a long way from summer in both directions. Those factors make the day feel even shorter than it is. Much shorter. It’s bad. Come January, with the holidays over, it’s no better. In February, spring is just around the corner, but it’s not here yet. February sucks everywhere. Then in mid-March, things start looking up and the perceived length-of-day starts shooting upward. But it doesn’t change fast enough to suit our need for instant gratification. Thus the perceived-length-of-day curve remains behind the actual-length-of-day curve until, suddenly, in early June; the rains stop, the birds come out, and you realize that summer is here.

This is when the psycho-pendulum starts swinging in the other direction. The momentum from the unfulfilled expectations of spring sweeps you straight through the actual-length-of-day curve in the blink of an eye. Now it feels like the days are oh-so-much-longer than they really are and you bask in the long, warm days, remembering what you are sure was just the bad dream of winter. This delusion goes on much longer than it should as well. As the actual-length-of-day falls off the peak in September you happily coast along knowing that it could never be as bad as you remember. You, as an example striking a bit too close to home, work in the garden, plan for bees and chickens and wildflowers and miniature sheep, certain that these halcyon days are destined to last.

But then, in mid-November, you wake up one day and it’s pitch dark outside and the clock says seven AM.

And you’re right back where you started.

I know the days are getting longer now; even though I can’t feel it yet. In about eight days there will be a full eight hours and thirty minutes of daylight. The rate at which the day lengthens will speed up too. Soon daylight will consume more of the day than darkness. There will be gardens to tend, bees to corral, grass to mow. All of it needing to be done, right now. Immediately. And I’ll stand there, wearily; sweating in the almost-midnight sun and dreaming about sitting in front of a fire and reading.

Ah, December. Those were the days.