After three days and nights of intermittent rains, it’s finally beginning to feel like summer.
It should: This is, after all, the day of longest light. I know it’s popular to believe that that’s tomorrow, but it’s not; the summer solstice occurs at 3:13 AM MDT tomorrow, which means that at tomorrow’s sunset, the light will vanish that tiniest fraction earlier than it does today.
We may not, of course, see a real sunset on either day. Tomorrow’s forecast predicts a something like a 97% chance of rain for most of the day. While this day’s chance currently holds at 15%, the clouds are amassing steadily and the winds is readying itself for any excuse to rise. I suspect we shall have at least a shower before day and night are done.
On the other hand, if we do have a real sunset on either day? It’s entirely likely to look something like the one in the image above: haunting skyfire, a last bit of the day’s medicine before fall of dark.
That image is not especially recent; Wings shot it at day’s end in early August ten years ago. It’s a companion image to the three that will appear in tomorrow’s post, all of those captured literally seconds apart from the exact same vantage point, this one immediately after by standing in place but turning one hundred eighty degrees to look westward. It was six weeks after that year’s solstice, but at the very heart of the season’s monsoonal patterns, and it delivered a play of light that was truly a gift of the spirits.
The images from tomorrow form a rainbow of sorts. No, there’s no actual rainbow in any of them, but the light itself, taking together, creates its own. This image, though, was all the shades of fire, which is exactly what, perhaps counterintuitively, a monsoonal sunset is here: gold, amber, copper, coral, crimson, mulberry, violet. It’s a product of the clear alpine air filtering the light of the setting sun through the lingering clouds from a storm already passed through, and witnessing it day after day is, or rather, was, an experience uniquely this land’s own. (No, that’s not to say that other alpine desert lands don’t have similar fires in the summer sky; it’s only to say that our own microhabitat here creates its own versions, not subject to replication under any other conditions.)
At this moment, the mercury hovers round seventy-five, seemingly remarkably cool for June — but not, as it happens, for a June afternoon at the start of the rainy season. (And don’t believe the nonsense coming from colonial media “experts”; this is neither early nor any kind of record, and one need not have a memory longer than the last decade to know that.) Our humidity is currently pegged at thirty-three percent, but that will likely grow as the afternoon wears on. Even as I write these very words, the sun has partly vanished behind yet another wall of clouds, white towering thunderheads heavy at their bases with the promise, or at least the hope, of rain.
Outside, the south fields are still bare, not merely of green but of all the topsoil stolen by the year’s trickster winds. The nearer fields and the lawn are stll as much brown as green; too many trees are dying or already dead. The mountains are sparsely studded in places where they once were lush and green at this season, with whole stands of dead deciduous trees topping some peaks and widening spots of bare tundra and rock where evergreens have already been felled by the drought. The wildfires surrounding us remain a very real risk, as do the lightning bolts accompanying every new rain, and the rains themselves hold the dangers of flash floods, mudslides, and debris flows in the burn scars.
But after so much drought and death, these last three days, we have been fortunate. Oh, we lost some ProPanel and whole sections of latilla fence to the windstorm of Saturday’s earliest hours; lost, too, the ancient and gnarled dead tree at our south boundary. But the rains since have been long and steady, soaking gently into the wounded earth, and already we can see the healing in the results.
Tonight, if we are lucky still, the only fire will be the one in the western sky, much like the scape above. And after so many long weeks and months and years of drought and destruction, disintegration and death? On this day of longest light, that is medicine beyond price.
~ Aji
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