Summer solstice at the Great Circle
The experience of the architecture and atmosphere for one person
Today was my second summer solstice sunrise at a World Heritage Site: I was up to watch the bats leave Carlsbad Caverns one June in the late 1980s. But this was my first summer solstice since the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks were inscribed, as the term is used, on the World Heritage List.
This morning, at the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks, I went as I have done many June dawns over the years, maybe two dozen summer solstice sunrises over 35 years. Some would debate whether today or tomorrow is technically the solstice sunrise, since the actual astronomical solstice is later this afternoon, but I will be away tomorrow. The day before and after are essentially the same in alignment and hour; Sunday days will start almost imperceptibly at first to get shorter. For now, through St. John's Day or "Old Midsummer" on June 24th, we have a string of longest days of the year, with around here sunrise close to 6 am, sunset 9 pm, and this year a Strawberry Moon full and close to sunsets.
In 2009, the dawn and mist combined for some truly awe inspiring effects looking back out to the northeast from the center, in front of Eagle Mound and out the single doorway towards the sunrise. Most years, like this one, the clouds prevent any horizon level view, with the long lines of sunrise creating longer shadows and dramatic filtration of the visible light.
Today, as I climbed from the parking area to the doorway into the Great Circle, there was light mist around the museum, but as you looked to the interior of the earthen enclosure, you saw much heavier ground fog. That's fairly common around the summer solstice.
In fact, the Great Circle creates a microclimate of sorts. You feel a drop in temperature as you enter, and just after the sun is clear of the horizon, as you leave, you feel heat increase once you're outside of the doorway. Many mornings there is a pool of fog inside at dawn, which burns off quickly as the sun comes up, so you don't see it unless you're there around 6 am or so.
Walking in pre-dawn, you feel the weight, and presence, and auditory difference of the higher humidity within the enclosed area, and even experience the smell of something different inside the Great Circle. As you walk, you carry a circle of clarity, which advances as you move, but at a distance the fog gets thicker for a bit, until sunrise comes. From the center, looking back out at the northeastern horizon, the trees shroud the more distant horizon, with a narrow band below the lowest branches allowing a brief glimpse of the actual horizon beyond. Low clouds in the east mean you don't see the sun many mornings until twenty or thirty minutes after actual sunrise, but the clouds overhead catch the light, and the tops of the oaks nearby. You know the sun has actually risen before you can see it.
My own interpretation of the Newark Earthworks is that there are a number of solar calendar alignments connecting the architecture of the structure now replaced with Eagle Mound, and the combination of moat and doorway turn-outs of the encircling wall, the interaction of negative space below and positive contour above. In a wider sense, it appears to me there are solar significances with the Great Circle, and lunar ones with the Octagon Earthworks, and the connections of the wider complex echo the connections seen and inferred between the solar path and lunar path, both above through seasons and years, and below. Was that "below" a sense of beneath the visible surface imagined as a plane, or a sphere? We don't know for certain, but there's sufficient reason to believe the Builders 2,000 years ago had a sense of the Earth being as round as the Moon and Sun. If they imagined one orbiting the other, so much the better, and their mathematics could have encompassed even a Copernican model. It's unclear.
I will simply say the sheer visceral impact of watching the Sun's golden-red glow rise up out of the extension of the moat, as if it had been rolling along below the surface until it was ready to swing up into the sky for a new day, is breathtaking. And even in years like this one, where the "up from the moat" effect is invisible, the memory of it combines with the regular experience of a pool of mist within the circle's embrace, to give the viewing of a sunrise there a powerful experience, mystical in a very everyday sort of "there it is" happening. It is, after all, "just" the sun rising, which it does every year. But in a space designed to contain . . . experiences? And containing a bit of mist, with which to catch the sun's light while shaping the shadows cast at dawn's first rays, the everyday experience of sunrise is something more, especially within the range, however understood, of that single opening to the northeast.
From the center, the sun rises within that carefully defined range from spring to fall, the warmer part of less than half the year. Late fall and winter into the early unreliable spring, the sun rises beyond that opening in the circle, off to the right as viewed from the tip of Eagle Mound. There's a pattern here we still are trying to understand.
However it was meant to work, or be used, the Great Circle still catches your breath at sunrise, especially in the summertime. You are outdoors, but within a structured space which shapes your experience, the sounds, the sights, the feelings you have, often shrouded by mist during that crucial interval before and just after dawn. You are in a place, and whether you share it with many or just a few or (more infrequently at solstice time) none, you feel a presence. I can only describe it so far, and beyond that, encourage you to get up early, wear shoes you don't mind getting soaked in the dewy grass, and go experience it for yourself.