The Sun is a Bully

The Sun is a Bully

The sun is a bully. Not a mean one like that kid in fifth grade. But more like that friend who doesn’t just come to your party, but makes an entrance. He yammers loudly, seems to be everywhere at once, with remarkable dexterity and consistency he redirects all conversations back to himself. Once tired of with redirects, he just starts talking over everyone. After a while he has exhausted all your guests, making them content to stew in their muteness, wondering which TV show awaits them on their DVR when they return home. Yeah, that kind of bully.

I got a campervan last year and am now taking three to four-day weekends all over the Southwest with my dog, Mumford. In my normal life I usually go to bed around ten or eleven and rise at seven. But when camping, I immediately transition to the daylight clock and go to bed soon after sunset and rise as the sky starts to brighten. As soon as light enters the campervan, I clamor to put my hiking clothes on, take my two tablespoons of Metamucil with eighteen ounces of water (yes, two heaping tablespoons, I know, a lot and surely an indication of something untoward going on, or perhaps not going on), heat up water for coffee I will carry in a Thermos up to the summit, and load up on water.

When I slide open the van door it’s light enough to start hiking, but if I’ve moved quickly enough, just barely. Those early morning hours are sublime. The forest is still. Mist rises from the lower creek beds. The smells of composted leaves and desert sage are at their peak, their scents triggered by the settling dew. Mumford relieves himself and we’re off on the trail.

For an hour or so everything remains harmonious and muted and shadowy and subtle. Mumford’s nose is electrified as he takes long drafts through his super-charged olfactory gland, also known as his nose. As I get a good pace going, I feel the flow of blood warm my body and tiny endorphins firing in my brain.

Then splashes of light appear on the hills above me. Bright splotches, highlighting granite cliffs and cutting through Jefferson pine groves and shining onto plain ridges. The clouds transition. They turn from purple to light pink and then, just clouds. All these incantations appear like a slide show assembled just for me. And, like a bobblehead, I look up and sideways and behind me to drink it all in because I know this show is fleeting. The mist now vanishes. The air turns thin. But still, diffuse remains.

Then the bully arrives. She peaks over the ridgeline ahead and makes an entrance. Not a subtle, inclusive, welcoming, interest-in-others entrance; not one that elevates, in equal measure, all the participants in the party. No, she makes an eye-squinting, brash, loud, brilliant, showy and penetrating entrance, shining incessantly, glaring obnoxiously and only more so when her whole body ascends above the ridge.

Then she starts to bully me. Not overtly with slashes or punches or 7.4 earth-trembling or blue-white lightning bolts. No, she’s much more subtle. She’s incessant and persistence and indefatigable with unrelenting radiance and invisible ultra-violet rays brown my skin. I remove my jacket in submission. I adjust my hat to avoid her gaze and protect my eyes with Polaroids. I dab on bullyscreen, SPF 30, and place my thumb through its hole in my Nike running shirt to cover the top of my hands so they won’t age-spot-discolor making me look eighty-one, not sixty-one.

Animals seek shelter. Scents are sucked out of the air. Trees rise to greet her but curl their leaves for protection. Grasses wither brown. Water evaporates leaving white mineral rings. Soil becomes grey dust because ol’ bully has to have her way.

Hours later she’s above us, loud as ever, brash as ever, bawdy as ever, indecent as ever. On this Solstice she gets fifteen hours of stage-time, barely enough to satisfy her insatiable appetite for attention, but plenty of time to bully me into surrender. But she’s not even at full strength yet, that’s still several hours away. Wait until four or five when I’m returning to the van, trudging down a dusty forest service road, Mumford barely keeping up behind me with his tongue clumsily off to one side. She will then be almost impossible to avoid, her angle too low, her heat compounded by the hot earth. But by this time, I don’t care. Bring on the skin cancer. Suck more moisture out of my body. Strain my eyes till they’re bloodshot. I give into you bully. You win. You always win.

Back at the campervan, named Daisy, I kick off my shoes and elevate my legs in the shade, finally protected from the bully. I hydrate. I doze off. I nurse a beer. No, I caress it as if it were an elixir. When it slides down my throat it seems to bring an element or a mineral or a chemical or something that my bully-beaten body craves. The beer is more than hydration. It’s remuneration. It’s salve. It’s recompense.

Then I start to notice around me that the sublime returns, the long shadows, the spotlighting of distant blotches of earth. Then a cool breeze lights upon my cheek. Oh, I love this time. Equal to that first breath of early morning air, but better. Now my limbs are stiff, my body tired and I can rest in its nobility. Now I’ve beat myself up enough to truly relax.

The bully agrees to get off stage, but as she exits, she has one last flourish to display; she has one last attention-grabbing thing to say to the world as she splashes pinks and oranges and purples in the sky. Even her exit is grand.

Has she gotten stronger in recent years? Is bully doubling down on her ruthless ways, heating up the planet? It sure feels like it.

But maybe its age. Not the age of the planet, but my age. At sixty-one I’m one of those old guys whose more sensitive to sun and heat. After all, climate-level changes aren’t usually measured in lifetimes but rather millennia. But who knows, maybe our indiscriminate domination of the planet has accelerated things so much that a thousand years are like a day. I don’t think so, but it could be.

But is she really a bully? She’s been throwing off the same rays not for millennia, but for billennia. (I know there’s no such word as billennia, but I bet you got it.) Maybe it’s not her who has changed.

Maybe it’s us who have changed. Maybe our atmospheric filter has been altered. Maybe we altered it. Maybe we’re the bully.