23 June 2003

The Day the Earth Stood Still

It was the longest day of the year and the first day of summer and I nearly froze my ass off down on the pool deck when I got out of the water. This is the strangest of years. It was so cold on Saturday that I actually forgot about the solstice. This is a big deal for those who desire a life apart from the darkness before the job and the darkness after emerging from our subterranean parking places in the evening. There is time for something that passes as life.

Oh, it had been a hell of a week. I walked into the office on Friday from the parking garage and saw some of the Command Center people heading down to the office space we occupy in the third sub-basement. Or I should say had occupied, because the torrential downpour that came through after midnight had pooled its might against the building, pressure on all sides of the deep retaining walls and found a hole. It was the drain in the defunct shower in one of the bathrooms that was the chink in our watertight integrity, and it rose slowly and inexorably through that drain until the whole warren of offices was a half-foot deep in sloshing storm water. Those computers that sat under the workstations on the floor that had not been turned off arced and flashed and went dead. The rest just filled up with water, the Local Area Network connectors hissed and shorted and by the time someone arrived to look down the stairs at the placid reflecting pool the damage had been done.

I went down with the second wave of the de-watering team and sloshed around in my dress shoes. The offices were filled with the whine of dry vacs and the sound of squeegees pushing water. The preliminary estimate was a hundred grand in damage, and I was sure it would go higher, since these things always do. Our backup supplies were OK- the Meals Ready to Eat and the bottles of water for thirty days had not been contaminated, but the cardboard boxes in which they were stored on the bottom tier were bulging from the weight of the dry boxes on top of them. It might be simpler to just pitch them, which was a waste, but the building crew wanted to start tearing up the sodden rug tiles and knocking down the cubicles as quickly as possible. As in any disaster, the artifacts of personal life were scattered on work surfaces, and half the employees were on temporary assignment out of the building.

So that was how the day began and that is one of the reasons why the solstice got away from me. And the weather was the other one. It rained Friday and it rained Saturday and it sprinkled on Sunday. But there is an imperative that will not be denied. The Earth's rotational axis remained tilted at an inclination of 23.5 degrees. On one day in December and one in late June, the axis is tilted most directly toward or away from the sun. Around June 21, when the North Pole is pointed sunward, we here in Arlington experience the longest day and shortest night of the year. We bring the rest of the Northern Hemisphere along with us. Around the time of the winter and summer solstices, the sun appears to rise and set at almost exactly the same places on Route 50, which is what the ancients would have constructed instead of Stonehenge if they had cars.

The word "solstice" is derived from the Latin "sol" or sun, and "sistere" meaning to stop or stay in place. Hence, solstice means "the day the sun stood still," or as the ancients said, "TDTESS." In our parlance, that equates to the old science fiction movie with the giant robot and Michael Rennie standing on the ramp explaining how things are going to be from that moment on. That movie was made at the beginning of the Cold War, which is when I was beginning, too. I was born just before the solstice in 1951, the same time the movie was released. It begins with a saucer landing in Washington, right on Capitol Hill. It starts with the dramatic words:

"We bring you this special radio/television broadcast in order to give you the very latest information on an amazing phenomenon - The arrival of a 'space ship' in Washington... The ship, designed for travel outside the Earth's atmosphere, landed in Washington today at three forty-seven P.M., Eastern Standard time. We still do not know where it came from…"

"Just a minute ladies and gentlemen... I think something is happening..."

"We have come to visit you in peace, and with goodwill."

Now that movie had a robot! TDTESS was nothing like what we expect in a sci-fi thriller these days. "Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines" is due out a few days after the solstice and it will be a couple hours of non-stop special effects untrammeled by plot or acting. TDTESS has one melted tank, no gory deaths, and one small chase scene. The robot also destroys the Capitol, but there are others that want to do that these days. Considering I work across the street from the building with the great dome, it has a certain resonance. Tension in the film is created through character development and the emotive performances of Patricia Neal and Michael Rennie, with some wonderful supporting work from the young Sam Jaffe who had not yet become a wise old doctor and Frances Bavier, best remembered for her continuing dramatic performance as Mayberry's Aunt Bea, our re-run equivalent of the Earth Goddess.

So the symbols of the Goddess are around us always, even if I misplaced her day. The old people of Europe were more directly connected to the earth than we are. Summer was a joyous for those living in the northern latitudes. The snow had disappeared. The ground had thawed; warm temperatures had returned; flowers were blooming; leaves had returned. Some herbs could be harvested, for medicinal and other uses. Food was easier to find, and those crops that had already been planted would be harvested in the months to come. Although ninety days remain before the fall, the days begin to shorten today on the long race around the sun to the dark of winter goes over the top, like a roller coaster car. It slows for a moment only to hurtle forward, plunging into negative gravity, making our stomachs rise.

This time of year, between the planting and harvesting of the crops, was the traditional month for weddings. This is because the ancients believed that the "grand union" of the Goddess and God occurred in early May around the Druid festival of Beltaine, half-way between the vernal equinox and the solstice. The Druids acknowledged the joy of the onset of warmth by postulating that deities had intimate relations around that time. Since competition with the gods is never a smart career move, most couples delayed their weddings until June. Which remains a favorite month for marriage today. I had an interesting conversation with one of the young women in the office. She was enmeshed in a series of weddings, in a critical role as a Bridesmaid. She was in my office for something else and in passing mentioned to me that she had to get her hair trimmed, nothing too radical so as to not compete with the Bride, she was going to get it cut right after work and then drive to Baltimore except the lining on the skirt of the Bridesmaid dress seemed to pull out and show when she bent over and the people at the shop at Tysons in Virginia didn't seem very helpful and that was Virginia and she was going to be in Maryland and the wedding was Sunday so she would just have to avoid bending over at the ceremony, not that that would be a problem since she didn't intend to do much of that, although there was the distinct possibility that all the dresses suffered from the same structural issue and you can only imagine what it would look like if all the maids bent over at once.

Being on the topic of weddings, I note that most societies in the northern hemisphere, ancient and modern, have celebrated a festival on Midsummer. I have seen the Norwegians run amok in the piney forests on Midsummer when there was only a brief dusk and no night. In ancient Gaul they had the Feast of Epona, named after a mare goddess who personified fertility. The Germans burn things, of course, and celebrate a night of fire and lust. In Rome the festival of Vestalia was held in honor of the Goddess of the hearth, Vesta. After the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the feast day of St. John the Baptist was set on the 24th of June. Curiously, the feast is held on the date of his birth, while other saints' days are observed on the anniversary of their deaths. Native Americans worshipped the Great Spirit in a variety of incarnations. The Natchez tribe in the South worshiped the sun and believed that their ruler was descended from him. Nobody was allowed to harvest the corn until after the feast.

And of course the modern pagans are among the most colorful of all the celebrants, and a bit contrarian. Based on what they consider to be ancient Celtic beliefs and practices, Wiccans recognize eight seasonal days of celebration. Four are minor sabbats, occurring at the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The other are major sabbats which are approximately halfway between an equinox and solstice. The summer solstice sabbat is called Midsummer or Litha. Wiccans may celebrate the evening before, at sunrise on the morning of the solstice, or at the exact time of the solstice. Sort of like Catholics and mass on the weekends, which includes the one Saturday evening in shorts and golf shirts that I will never figure out.

I celebrated Midsummer on the pool deck, shivering. I did not realize I was poised at the exact moment when I would begin to plunge toward the darkness of the fall. Not knowing that it was the precise moment the sun stood still.