Carl Sandburg never once thought of writing that Chicago was “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Watcher of Lovely Sunsets.”
Chicago just never has been a sunset town, never will be.
Sunrises over Lake Michigan can hold a kind of quiet enchantment-although seeing one usually means that you got up too early or stayed out too late.
But sunsets in Chicago are as devoid of spiritual meaning as a mercury vapor light hovering over a parking lot.
Sunsets here bleach out drapes, blind motorists and make people swear off western exposure apartments.
On Wednesday, the summer solstice, the dynamic of sunsets will make one of its great annual adjustments. While the place on the horizon where the sun sets has been marching north since December, it will turn around Wednesday afternoon and begin moving incrementally farther south.
The great arc the summer sun draws across the sky will begin to flatten.
Sunrises will begin getting later, sunsets earlier, nibbling away at the precious edges of daylight.
Other cultures-mostly dead ones-have recognized all this as a celestial phenomenon of profound importance, something to be celebrated, danced under and sung to.
Among the more pyrotechnical celebrations was the 16th Century German tradition of setting fire to a giant straw wheel and rolling it down a hillside into a river-a delightful way to symbolize the seasonal setting of the sun that begins at the solstice.
But in the here and now, the solstice generally goes unnoticed.
“If you go to work in downtown Chicago amidst the cement, what does it matter?” said Kay Read, an anthropology professor at DePaul University.
In some places, sunsets are so beautiful that people pull over in their cars to watch them. They stop traffic here, too, but for different reasons.
“It is very common to have delays caused just by sunset slowdowns,” said Lonny Tyler, a traffic reporter for Shadow Traffic. “When the sun gets low, it finds a way right into your windshield and plasters you right in the eyeballs.”
How romantic.
Laurie Scheer remembers her first Chicago sunset.
She had moved here in September from California, where every day she went to the beach and watched the sun slip into the Pacific. Sunsets were a time for her to reflect on her day.
In Chicago, she rented a 26th-floor Lake Shore Drive apartment that faces west. After she moved in, she stood in the window and watched her first sunset.
There was no elation, no spiritual elevation, just disappointment. Watching the sun slipping into Berwyn just wasn’t as religious as watching it slip into the ocean.
“In California, the sun is silver-dollar size, here it is quarter sized,” she said. “It’s just not the same.”
Now, the setting sun chases her from her apartment. She pulls her drapes against its heat and harsh light.
Eric Carlson recalls some great sunsets, too. In Kansas, where he grew up, the sky was filled with dust, scattering all the bands of light except the red ones.
“I remember riding along in the back seat of my parents’ car, going out to visit my grandfather’s farm in Dodge City, and we would turn north at one point and we would see it like a big orange ball bouncing over the hills,” he said.
He tries to look at sunsets here. He walks his dog to a nearby park, looks at the ducks on the lagoon and tries to get a glimpse of a setting sun.
“In the city, you have trees, buildings, houses crammed together,” Carlson said. “It’s really hard to see a full sky here, there is always part of it cut off.”
But Carlson, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium, understands all the beautiful science of sunsets and the solstice.
He knows that at 3:34 p.m. Wednesday, the Earth’s axis will be leaning closest to the sun (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). The sun will cross the sky almost directly overhead (72 degrees off the southern horizon). By comparison, the winter sun (at 24 degrees) can barely clear treetops to the south.
To a Chicago observer, the sun is setting at 33 degrees north of due west. It will begin moving south until it sets at 33 degrees south of due west at the winter solstice.
And it will be the longest day of the year, with almost 15 hours of daylight. And then, a sunset that will largely go unnoticed.
There are some people out there who celebrate the solstice, people seeking to find some meaningful connection with the Earth, trying, in a way, to keep the pagan in them alive.
Many New Age, goddess-oriented groups that have sprung up are resurrecting and modifying the ancient myths and ceremonies to help ritualize their beliefs. They worship ancient female deities and are inclined to focus on cycles of nature.
The Oak Park group Lumina will celebrate the summer solstice on Friday at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Oak Park. The goddess-oriented organization has celebrated the summer solstice for 10 years, ritualize the passage of young girls into womanhood.
In Chicago, some 40 to 50 people associated with Healing Earth Resources, a Lincoln Park shop, are planning an evening of drumming and chanting at Belmont Harbor on Sunday.
“People who live in the city have to somehow stay attached to nature,” said Luke Michaels, store worker. “Without that connection, city people are less likely to take care of the planet.”
