A late December walk

'Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor,
The watery shore,
Is given thee till the break of day.'

William Blake

Today is the last day of the darkest two weeks of the year, the shadows stretched long on the beach like languid lovers unaware of the long darkness just hours away.

Leslie and I, shadows of each other, walked along the edge of the ocean, gathering whirly whelk skeletons tossed up by the tide. They look harmless enough, and are lovely enough to be our state shell. When alive, though, they tore at the insides of clams and oysters, slicing away at living flesh, as utterly cruel as anything, and everything, carnivorous.

I wandered over to the bay side, to see what I could see, and to feel what I could feel. It's late December, and I need light.

The beach is littered with dying comb jellies glinting like diamonds in the long light of the sun. Hundreds lie like lenses, highlighting the grains of sand that mark their morgues.

Crabs stare vacantly at their scattered parts, a few limbs here, a few more there, the sand pocked by the webbed prints of their murderers. Every calorie is precious now.

I see now what I fail to notice in summer--the delicate array of white dots outlining the dead crab's carapace, the ornate ridging of its body, the shadows cast by the undulating shell.

Every crab I saw today was dead. I saw a dead gull, a dead menhaden, a few dead horseshoe crabs, and hundreds of dying comb jellies.

The gulls barely moved to get out of the way. The sun has left us, the cost of useful energy is steep. The sunlight is useful for sight, but not much more now.

The few horseshoe crab shells look like they could walk back into the bay, their compound eyes seem to watch everything happening around them, Lazareths of the Sea.

They, too, are dead, their pointed armor useless now, allowing the weak winter light to penetrate.

The sun holds still in the south now. Soon it will creep northward again, bringing with it the unimaginably alive late spring beach, where the dying are ignored.

The last few moments of my walk I saw a fly on a jetty, a spirited reminder of the springs to come.

Now, though, the beach belongs to the dead, who will own all of us eventually, and despite the ragged edges, the broken bodies, the rank smell of decomposing flesh, the beauty of the beach will not allow me to turn away.

All photos taken today, North Cape May, along my favorite bay.

Dark

Last week of the sinking sun.


The Earth hurtles closer to the sun, but my little piece of paradise edges more and more oblique to the sun, our source of light, of life. We're in the dark season.

***

The bell still rings at 7:45 in the morning. It's not a bell anymore, but we still call it that. I blew a conch shell as the bell sounded, an old shell that has been around the science wing for years. My students were as amazed by the loud bellowing of the conch shell as I am by their iPhones.

The conch was once alive. It no longer is. Neither is obvious to most of us scurrying under the fluorescent hum of December lights.

***

We're studying photosynthesis now, my absolute favorite subject in biology, except maybe quahogs, which aren't part of the curriculum.

Things are not connecting as well as I'd like, but they rarely do in mid-December. The trees are bare at the moment. We could take a lesson from them--not much happening under the sky when the sun fades away.

ATP synthase. Chemiosmosis. Electron transport chain. I mention the words, knowing that they will roll off my students cerebra as water rolls off a leaf. And that's fine with me.

Everything that burns easily in my classroom does so because of the grace of plants, capturing the energy sent forth by our sun. The plants in the back of the room continue to grow under our fluorescent lamps, trapping any carbon dioxide that wander too close to their chloroplasts, carbon dioxide that arose from the deepest cells of the few animals in the classroom.

Most of the mammals in the area are biding their time, waiting for the sun to hold still in the sky, waiting for it to turn back northward again.

The plants remind me that our breath is real, that what was once part of me is now part of another living being, communion in the classroom.

The sun hardly gets the attention it once did. Not one child in my classroom is the child of a farmer. Not one child in my classroom depends on any harvest within a hundred miles of home.

Every child, though, plants a seed. Every child is reminded what their ancestors knew. A few of them realize what has been lost. Not many, but enough.

It's the enough that carries me through the winter solstice.

Photos by us.

Seasonal affective disorder is not

Yep, this one again--I trot it out pretty much every year now for those who wonder why I'm such a crab in the winter....

Every year the Earth orbits around the sun, and every year, the shadows lengthen as the days shorten. While this may be news to those living in a linear world, a few of us still revel in the cycles of life.

Several orbits ago, while folks at the more extreme latitudes again fell into their annual funk, a few shrinks noted a pattern. Enough people became distressed by the coming winter that they bought an entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition, and now had a diagnosis--seasonal affective disorder--justifying the use of expensive psychotropic agents to make them "happy."

Winter time blues is now a psychiatric disorder.

As more and more of us become naturalized citizens of Prozac nation, a few cranky souls remain prescription-drug¹ free, titrating the available OTC medicines with caffeine, alcohol, and herbs, surviving yet another winter.

What symptoms make the diagnosis of SAD?

(1) increased rather than decreased sleep;
(2) increased rather than decreased appetite and food intake with carbohydrate craving;
(3) marked increase in weight;
(4) irritability;
(5) interpersonal difficulties (especially rejection sensitivity), and
(6) leaden paralysis (a heavy, leaden feeling in the arms or legs).

Surveys estimate that 4 to 6 percent of the general population experience winter depression, and another 10 to 20 percent have subsyndromal features.²

To summarize, about a quarter of otherwise normal human beings sleep more, eat more, gain weight, and get irritable in the winter, just like any other self-respecting mammal that wandered too far from the Equator since the last Ice Age.

Let me review the annual cataclysmic events that should shake anybody's sense of complacency in this wonderful and truly terrifying world of ours:

1) Every winter, most plants either die or go into suspended animation. The vast majority of our crops die here. In my garden, half ripe eggplants hang like bruised egos in the dying light of December. My tomato vines are black, gnarled skeletons. The basil plants are but a memory.

If the crops fail in the spring, we could starve. Instead of worrying all winter, a few of us choose to stuff our bellies as full as we can with last year's surplus, then sleep.

2) The air becomes so dry that mild patches of eczema and psoriasis turn into vast swaths of reptilian skin, repulsing friends and family, who are all just as irritable as you.

Now I'm flaky, fat, and fearful, living under forced solitude--feeling happy just upsets the natural order of things.

3) In New Jersey, the sun rose at 5:26 AM on June 21, 2008, and set at 8:32 PM., over 15 hours of sweet, summer rays. On December 21, the sun will rise at 7:18 AM, barely peek over the horizon, then plunge back down at 4:32 PM--just over 9 hours of dull winter light. That depresses me. If you are paying any attention, it will depress you, too.

4) Look at those bills! Paying for the juice of long dead ferns to keep my home heated condemns me to long hours at work. I know air-conditioning is expensive, too, but AC is a luxury. Heat keeps you alive. You have no choice.

Sleeping late under a cozy comforter lets me keep the heat turned down longer, and saves money.

5) The local roads freeze, and the December demolition derby begins; debt-ridden SUV owners try to justify their monstrous credit-eating over-sized sedans by driving like crazed maniacs in icy conditions.

I can hardly blame them--if I plunked 35 grand after watching commercials in which the SUV climbed perpendicularly up a snow-covered mountain, I'd expect my car to handle a level road. They do go nicely perpendicular into ditches, though.

What is a rational person to do? Seems like crawling into the bed under a comforter with a huge bag of Doritos while others careen to work on icy highways makes perfect sense.

Feeling down? Little wonder. I just don't think that it is a disorder. Nor do I think my annual spring fever is a problem. Watching the Earth spring back to life deserves some manic dancing. Come April, I'll look at this post and wonder how I could ever have been so grumpy. Until then, I am going to bed.

¹This is not a diatribe against drugs, just a cranky diatribe in general. Proper use of the appropriate drugs can be quite beneficial.
²S. Atezaz Saeed, M.D., and Timothy J. Bruce, Ph.D., American Family Physician, March 15, 1998.

December shadows

It's dark again, a reminder of what we mostly ignore.

Life depends on light, depends on combining simpler particles into larger, less stable ones. We juggle these unstable particles in every one of our cells every day, and every day they fall apart.

We eat to get those particles inside, we breathe in order to break them down back to their more stable pieces, so that we can do the things we need to do.

We lose ourselves as carbon dioxide in the breath we exhale.

Every year the CO₂ levels rise in these parts, as the plants pause over the winter. We could learn something from the plants.

***

I do not know many people well, and the number diminishes as my December comes. I saw a honeybee land on a dandelion today. I saw a grasshopper sitting in the sun. The days are short for both of them.

The days are short for us, too.

***

Our guidance department has a flyer that asks "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?"

In December, it's the wrong question. We all eventually fail. I'd rather ask a child this: "If you truly understood that you were mortal, what would you do?"

Would that wise child take an AP course just to improve her transcript? Would that wise child sit in my class?

We cannot expect a child to have that kind of wisdom, and even if she had it, we have all kinds of social tools to get her to do our bidding anyway. We should, however, expect it from the adults.

If you truly believed you were mortal, that your students were mortal, that this H. sapiens species experiment will likely flame out just as every other species eventually has, what would you teach?

I'm a science teacher. I share what we know about the universe to children who did not exist less than two decades ago. This is all still new to them.

And it's still all new to me.

As the sun fades away to the south, the question becomes urgent. What matters?

Pics taken today.