Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
The longest day
According to the day’s daily newspaper, the sun rose in Toronto on Tuesday (the longest day of the year) at 5:37 a.m. and set at 9:04 p.m. A total of 15 hours and 27 minutes of sunlight (and most of it was indeed sunlight). Of course, way up here on the Oak Ridges Moraine we probably theoretically got a couple of minutes more, although practically, because of all the darn hills in the way, we really got quite a bit less. I certainly don’t remember a glimmer of sunlight by 5:37, although to be fair, our bedroom window faces west, so the sun could have snuck over the horizon without me noticing (yes, all right, on deadline day I was still in bed at 5:37).
At any rate, give or take a few minutes, we Uxbridgers got about 15.5 hours of sun on the longest day. Conversely, it was actually sunless (although not quite dark on the edges) for 8.5 hours. All I can say is, as a veteran of 18 Yukon summers, that’s a pretty wimpy longest day.
I spent several glorious summers in Dawson City, the Klondike boom town which in the summer is the second biggest town in the territory, next to the capital, Whitehorse. Dawson in the summer has about ten times its winter population, and that’s because all its primary economic activity - tourism, gold mining, salmon fishing - are focused on the 15 weeks between Victoria Day and Labour Day. And why wouldn’t they be? At the height of the summer, you can easily put in a 20-hour day without a hint of darkness. There’s even a local golf tournament that starts at 2 a.m. In the days before the dredges chewed up all the arable land, Dawson even had a huge market gardening industry. The season was short, but the hours of sunlight were so long that the veggies were immense.
Dawson is pretty close to the 64th parallel, a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, which you cross when you head up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik. That means that even on June 21, there are still a few minutes of darkness, surrounded by about a half hour of dusk and dawn. And thanks to the peculiarities of time zones, that darkness doesn’t happen at midnight, but closer to 1:30 a.m. But the party starts a lot earlier. Most true northerners heartily celebrate the longest day, because six months later they have to put up with its opposite. For good reason, I was never in Dawson on Dec. 21.
Dawson has lots of parties on June 21, but the biggest one, the one heavily populated by young summer employees, takes place up above the Moosehide Slide on the Midnight Dome. The Slide is a big geological scar created centuries before the Gold Rush, and it served as a glorious landmark for the Klondike stampeders as they rounded the last bend of the Yukon River, certain that fame and fortune were now just a matter of hours away. And now, up there looking down on Dawson, hundreds gather on the night of June 21 to say goodbye to the sun, and welcome it back about a half hour later.
A few of the summer folk I knew had trouble getting used to all that daylight. They would emerge from Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Casino (which for a long time was the only legalized casino in the country) after the 2 a.m. closing, and the sun would already be back up, so their souls told them to stay awake. By the time mid-July arrived, they were exhausted. Putting heavy shades on the windows didn’t help, they could feel the sun beating down on them. They were missing something if they slept through it.
I, on the other hand, have always been able to sleep anywhere, any time. I cherished the sun during the Yukon winter, but not to the point of cabin fever or SAD. And after the first party on the Dome (which every cheechako has to experience), I became pretty nonchalant about the Midnight Sun thing.
Nevertheless, I still have trouble with being this far south. After you come out of the theatre on a hot July night, you shouldn’t be besieged with bugs and bats, but with birds and ‘beams. I would love to sit on the dock or the deck, reading or playing cards until I’m ready for bed, not being chased inside by darkness before it’s even 10 o’clock. Doesn’t seem Canadian somehow.
Now most of my readers will have been born and raised with this scarcity of summer sunlight. To you I say, go north. The experience of the Arctic summer is unforgettable. A few years ago, I took a few Uxbridge friends on a canoe trip down the Yukon River. We paddled well into the evening. We did a Robert Service recitation on the Bard’s front lawn at midnight. My friends still talk about it. I really believe the warmth of the summer sun is part of the spell which draws people back to that part of the world time and again.
But until I return, I’ll continue to celebrate the dawn at 5:37, and to be content way down here in the Land of the 9:05 Sun.
