Summer Is Time for New Horizons

Be home when the streetlights come on, parents in the United States used to yell as kids ran out the door, and for American children of a certain era the freedoms of June felt completely different from the freedoms of, say, March. Summer vacation unrolled like a carpet whose end disappeared over the horizon, and days seemed infinite. Nobody wore watches, or was surveilled, or had a schedule except maybe for swim lessons or free films at the public library. You woke up whenever, had breakfast of whatever, and went out in front of your house to see who was already on the street, slamming the screen door on the way and maybe earning a holler from your mom. After that…who knew?

The first time I went to Greenland, it was May and the sun had already risen above the Arctic Circle and it stayed light my entire visit. For a photographer and explorer, this was a godsend. “Day” lost its meaning and potential lay wherever I looked, but I quickly exhausted myself staying up until I was tired, then crashing until I wasn’t. After a few cycles of this, I finally succumbed and did what I’d been counseled to do, which was to put on an eyeshade, pop in earplugs, and live the cycle my body evolved on its own.

Rhythm is as important to our lives as the bass line in a song. When I worked for a ski magazine and most of my time was spent skiing, thinking about skiing, and writing about skiing, I wasn’t particularly sad when the ski season ended. I mean, yeah, a little, but I have never totally understood the folks who head to the southern hemisphere resorts as soon as our lifts close. I like the break, which leaves time for surfing or mountain biking or just warming your bones, and I love how special summer turns feel if you do sneak them in. Most of all, though, I enjoy the change of summer and the way each lengthening day is a promise of the next day’s possibility.

What would it have been like to experience the seasons as one of the first people to live on the North American continent? I often wonder how those earliest Americans embodied this place, and how different their experience was from ours. If you’ve never spent a night severely undersheltered, you have no idea how welcome the first rays of morning light can be. What was that like writ large, on the first day after a trying winter when you knew there was nothing but warmth ahead? What was it like sensing the equinox and anticipating the solstice, knowing that summer, or whatever word you had for it, stretched out in front of you? It would have been a time of celebration, and relief, and a time to explore.

Although evidence points to even earlier occupation, North America was well-peopled by thirteen thousand years ago. Whether by Siberian land bridge, coastal kelp highway, boat, or all three, humans arrived at the end of the last glacial maximum and quickly dispersed. With food and space widely available, surely they were driven by curiosity and a sense of adventure. As my friend Craig Childs noted in Atlas of a Lost World, the dopamine receptor D4 is associated with novelty seeking, and a genomic study of the remains of prehistoric individuals showed that the more distant they were from the land bridge, the more elongated D4 they had. In other words, those with the adventure gene pushed farther, faster. I picture the most sporting of our long-lost cousins in late spring, sloughing off their winter furs, watching mud bogs drying and birds flying north, then turning to one another and saying, “It’s summer, baby, let’s go.”

When the streetlights came on, I’d typically find myself a few blocks from home, late, and I’d sprint back and tumble through the front door a hot mess. But sometimes I’d be in our cul-de-sac, sitting on the curb with a friend, dusk too deep for playing catch, just sitting and talking and tracing cracks in the sidewalk with a stick while lightning bugs punctuated the night air with glowing exclamations. Then it would be dark dark and one of our parents would come out on the porch and yell and we’d drag ourselves toward home, yelling back, “Coming!” and the following day we’d do it all over again, this time with forts, the next with bike jumps: again and again, looking past our horizons, stringing together our endless summered days.