There Are No Cats In Texas

For Christmas, we attempted our first trip out of Alaska with Megan, and the first for Kristen and me since June. We flew to Dallas to spend a week with my family after managing to reserve the least painful commercially-available itinerary, which still involved a 1:45 AM departure from Anchorage and two 3+ hour flights separated by a too-short-for-breakfast layover in Seattle. Before leaving, I had mentally sketched the framework of a potential post about whatever embarrassing/exhausting/infuriating/hilarious things might come of spending more than 13 (nonconsecutive) hours flying with a lap-bound infant, one who admittedly is calm relative to what she could be but is nonetheless the most volatile thing I have ever carried onto an airplane. Four incident-free flights later, the four-and-a-half-month-old version of her appears to be an excellent and very sleepy traveler, which is great except that now I need to find something else to write about.

But there are no cats in America
And the streets are paved with cheese
Oh there are no cats in America
So set your mind at ease 

I do not have distinct personal memories of An American Tail as a notable part of my youth, despite its ostensible entrenchment in the sweet spot for being one: an animated film with anthropomorphic singing animals, released when I was five years old and featuring voice work by Dom Deluise, who in 1986 was a mere seven years from establishing himself as a favorite amongst my brothers and me for his virtuoso work in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, appearing as Don Giovanni in a single Godfather-spoofing scene which we could not possibly have fully appreciated at the time (having not seen the original) but still thought was hilarious because he is holding a plastic lizard. I probably did see An American Tail at some point - I think I vaguely remember watching part of it in school - but ours was a family of loyal Disney animation elitists, with Ferngully and The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven all missing the cut for an otherwise extensive VHS collection.

But Kristen grew up watching and loving it, so much so that she can recall the slightly deeper tracks from the soundtrack (non-"Somewhere Out There" division) even after years since last seeing it. So the fact that "There Are No Cats In America" came to her mind leading up to and during the trip is perhaps not as random as I originally found it to be. It is sung in the movie by the European mice as they embark for the United States, having so exaggerated to themselves the virtues of America that they expect to arrive in a utopian wonderland, absent everything they hate about where they come from but overflowing with the good stuff. 

This was an entirely appropriate parallel to us in the weeks leading up to our trip. A couple of Papa Mousekewitzes, counting down the days until we could escape this morose winter isolation and flee to the place universally recognized as Earth's most magnificent paradise: the north suburbs of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We'll spend time with all of those people we miss! No snow! It will be warm enough for Megan to wear a sundress and lay on the grass outside! We can eat Chick-Fil-A and great Mexican food and fresh, moderately-priced fruit! [Prominent national retailer] has [more than zero] locations within fifty miles of your location! We can check out that park they built over the highway downtown! It was going to be amazing.

Of course, it turns out that there are cats in America, a fact alluded to in the latter half of the original movie and later capitalized upon as a surprisingly bleak plot turn in the sequel, Fievel Goes West, the second act of which concludes with the protagonist being gruesomely devoured by a cougar in Arizona. [This may not be true. I never saw it because it came out in 1993, same as both the aforementioned RH:MIT and the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, so my twelve-year-old self was fully occupied that year with one of those bizarre adolescent confluences of interests, alternately quoting lines from a Dave Chappelle character in a Mel Brooks movie and fine-tuning a French accent for an impression of a cartoon candelabra.]

But I'm pretty there were some cats, just like we didn't quite get to see everybody we wanted to see for as long as we hoped to see them, and the Mexican food was not quite as many notches above its non-Texan competition as I had remembered, and we never made it down to that park but it looked smaller than I expected when we drove past it, and it definitely wasn't warm:

Snow in the front yard of my parents' house on Christmas day. In Texas. It was 80 degrees there on December 18. COME ON.

I do not mean to suggest that the trip was not fulfilling - it was fantastic. You could say it was everything that we should have hoped it would be. But it turns out that voraciously anticipating a thing for weeks on end is a pretty good way to ensure that the thing can't possibly meet every ridiculous expectation you have made for it, which inevitably tempers your fun a bit and is totally unfair to the thing. It's not Dallas's fault that we had been romanticizing it for the last two months, so I suppose we should cut it some slack if people there drive a little worse than we had chosen to remember or if one of its many superior shopping malls closes earlier on Sundays than we had hoped. I even caught myself thinking about Alaska a few times, once wishing for a coffee from our local shop and later missing the mountains. And while we were gone, as snow was falling in Dallas, a rare December warm front even blew through Anchorage, melting enough of the accumulated snow here that we could actually see some green grass in our yard when we got back.

If given the option, would we live somewhere other than Alaska? Definitely. Will we be just as excited the next time we leave here during the winter? Almost certainly, yes. Will that again bring on unrealistic expectations for our destination? I assume so. Have I derailed my first metaphor about the song from the immigrant mouse movie by introducing a second and more tenuous one about the grass being greener elsewhere? It appears that I have. Am I a serious- and skilled-enough writer, then, to eloquently divert this conclusion back into the context of the original theme? Probably not.
 

Daylight Hours at 61 Degrees Latitude: The Half-Assed Astronomy Lesson Nobody Was Asking For

A common question asked to us by people who have not yet visited Alaska (or those who have but somehow timed their visit to roughly coincide with an equinox) is some version of the one about how long the days are at different times of the year. One way to answer this - favored by some of the particularly engineery engineers that I used to work with - is to say, "Every day everywhere is 24 hours - that's how long it takes for Earth to complete one full rotation about its axis." This is met with the superlative kind of eye-roll typically reserved for reaction to a sixth-grader carrying around a book of language trivia and testing out newly-learned smart-ass grammar gotchas like how he can put his plate in the dishwasher but you never asked if he would. The question is of course not intended to be about the length of the midnight-to-midnight stretch (which has a fun technical name that I totally would have Balderdashed to instead be some sort of dragon) but rather how much of that period is comprised of daylight, the variance in which is admittedly kind of interesting and different from the Lower 48 but not as different as people might think.

Executive Summary

The shortest day of the year is December 21 (everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere). On that day in Anchorage, the sun rises at 10:14 AM and sets at 3:42 PM; dawn to dusk is more like 9:30 to 4:15. The sun arcs shallowly across the south horizon and spends a good part of the morning hidden behind the mountains, making the days feel even shorter; in late December, we can't see the sun at our house until almost noon.

The longest day of the year is June 21 (also everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere).  On that day in Anchorage, the sun rises at 4:21 AM and sets at 11:42 PM, but even at 2:00 AM the sky is not anything that I would call "dark". The sun rises in the northeast, traveling elliptically around the south sky and eventually down to the northwest before ducking behind the north horizon for a few hours.

Every day in between is something in between.

Thanks for reading! Here is a link to Google for continued internet browsing.

Totally Unnecessary Exposition (Optional Reading)

Why does the length of daylight vary throughout the year? If you're like me, you probably learned this sometime in middle school but then sort of forgot about it when you didn't have a reason to think about it every day, until you found out you had to move to Alaska and started vaguely recalling it while frantically researching whether you would ever again see the sun in January, and after about a year-and a-half of getting asked about it a lot you also (separately) just happened to have recently started writing this themeless blog with no self-imposed restrictions on subject matter, which seemed like a great place to write an indefensibly long post about it that probably could have just been two sentences with one picture and maybe a link to Wikipedia.

In simple terms - I do not mean this in a patronizing, "let me see if I can dumb this down" way, but more of a "I am almost certainly about to omit some critical nuance that I am not aware of or do not understand" way - two primary things affect the amount of sun exposure a given place on Earth sees on a given day: the latitude of the place and the tilt of Earth's axis.

If the axis of rotation were not tilted (it is - PAY ATTENTION - but if), things would be simple. Every place on the planet would have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night every day of the year because every place would spend half of each day on the light side of the globe and half on the dark side. Also, the apparent arc of the sun in a given place would be exactly the same every day of the year: at the equator, the sun would appear to arc directly overhead every day; in Alaska, it would follow a consistent year-round arc closer to the South horizon. This result of consistent daylight hours + consistent sun angles would be no seasons - for any given place, weather would be effectively the same in June as it is December.

But the axis is tilted relative to the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun, so everything changes slightly throughout the year. This is explained well enough here (Go Wolfpack!), including several useful pictures that are remarkably similar to the ones I was originally intending to produce myself until it became apparent that doing so would be quite redundant if considering the entirety of the Internet, never mind my eventual realization that this is not a textbook or PowerPoint presentation and that my time might be better spent on, like, laundry.

The takeaway is that the Northern hemisphere is pointed more directly towards the sun during a certain part of the year. We call this "summer". This change in astronomical perspective affects both the apparent angle of the sun relative to the horizon (when a spot is pointed more directly at the sun, the sun appears to travel more directly overhead of that spot) and the amount of time the sun is visible in the sky (a larger portion of the spot's path around the globe - i.e. that spot's day - is illuminated). This effect is magnified as you move further from the equator such that things get wacky at the poles: in the region from the North Pole to 66.5622° degrees latitude - the technical definition of The Arctic - there is a stretch of the summer during which the entire path around the globe is lit by the sun, meaning that the sun never sets. The opposite is true in winter, when the Arctic is entirely on the dark side of the globe and the sun never rises.

Anchorage's latitude (~61.2 degrees N) puts it just below this area, such that constant daylight or darkness never quite happens, although it comes close. The longest summer day sees only about 4 1/2 hours of "darkness", during which the twilight lingers and it is still light enough outside to read a newspaper but perhaps not to track down a fly ball. This is interesting and fun in ways that I have anecdotally described elsewhere, but it is also a little disconcerting being outside after dinner and a few drinks (or worse, leaving a dark bar) and feeling so tired in broad daylight. It is reminiscent of taking a flight from the East Coast to Las Vegas and going straight to a 10:00 PM dinner reservation at a restaurant in one of those indoor promenades made to look like it's outside, with all of your environmental clues suggesting it is early in the evening until you realize it's effectively 1:15 AM and you have been drinking for several hours and no wonder you are falling asleep on your appetizer.

In the winter, the shortest day gets just over 5 1/2 hours of official and legitimate daylight, and although dawn and dusk do bleed a bit into the hours prior to official sunrise and after official sunset, this is not fun. The most unexpected (to me) annoyance of this time of year is the low sun angle: driving south during the daylight hours of winter involves staring directly into a low but surprisingly intense glare:

Southbound driving on clear winter days. This was taken at 1:08 on 12/21/12 - exactly ten minutes after "solar noon" (when the sun reaches its high point over the horizon) on the shortest day of the year.

Strangely, real estate listings here highlight south-facing windows as a huge amenity. We do not have any, but I am not so sure that I would want them. Although I suppose that is what the blinds are for (blocking the natural light you paid extra for).