Lighten Up

There's nothing like 24 hour daylight to make you plain feel good about life.

24 daylight has arrived again, and boy did I miss it. It's amazing how quickly the hours of daylight change up here. Only a couple of months ago it was light during the day, and dark during the night. As you would expect. Suddenly, over what seems like only a few weeks, the hours of daylight expanded. It's an impressive rate of change. We live about 70km south of the Arctic Circle line, so we don't get direct sunlight for 24 hours. But the amount of daylight at 2am during the peak of summer time is such that you can happily sit outside and read a book. That's pretty cool. The local council switched off the street lights about a month ago. To be honest, I never noticed until I read about it in the newspaper.

This is a really fun time for me. For people born and bred in the region, it's no big deal. They go to bed at the same time as they always did. Not this cowboy. I still have to remember that it's time to go to bed when it's light outside. Daylight plays strange tricks on the mind and body. I can be sitting watching television and suddenly realise that it's 1am and I should have been in bed a couple of hours ago. My absolute favourite is to go out for a walk or a jog in the middle of the "night". That's way cool. It's like those science fiction films where a person wakes up and everyone else has vanished. Walking around a town in daylight and not seeing a single person, a single car, not hearing animals, complete silence. That's a real experience. On the odd occasion I do meet someone, they are usually a fellow immigrant. It's heaps of fun. Being out in the forest during the night time hours is also rather special. Despite it being daylight, all the noctural animals are out. They have to come out some time, right ? And now you get to see them.

Speaking of seeing nocturnal creatures, a couple of years ago I was out for a walk at around 2am. As you do. I had my camera with me at the time. I stopped to take a photo of something that caught my eye, I don't recall what it was now. A few days later I was downloading and going through the various photos I had taken. When I came to the photo I had taken that night at 2am, I noticed there was a large tree to one side of the photo. And, in that tree, about maybe 7 or 8 metres up in the branches, was a person ! Apparently just sitting there. An absolute classic. Of course it's hard to portray the significance of the event because the photo itself is so light that it looks like a photo taken in the middle of the day and I guess it's not such a total shock that a person would be sitting in a tree in the middle of the day. But at 2am ? 3 months ago I would never have known that he was there.