Tropics

A few nights ago, on our way from Mauritius to Richards Bay, South Africa, we left the tropics, sailing southwest across the south latitude of 23 degrees, 26 minutes, a latitude that defines the southern limit of the Tropic of Capricorn. Coincidentally, just as we crossed this line that defines the southern limit of the sun's ecliptic, the moon rose, half-full, against a clear eastern sky. This morning, as I assumed the watch, the sun lifted up from a glassy sea, a low haze betraying the complete absence of wind. Motoring southwest toward a waypoint 150 nautical miles south of the island of Madagascar, I imagined a line between the moon and the sun, and realized that astronomically speaking, the sun and moon now lay north of us. We are south of any of our previous positions on this circumnavigation, and we continue to head south to clear the Cape of Good Hope.

We entered the tropics over 20 months ago, as we sailed south through the Bahamas, passing across the north latitude of 23 degrees, 26 minutes, my home hemisphere's reciprocal tropic, the Tropic of Cancer. For roughly 630 days, we have been sailing in the so-called tropics, the portion of our globe that lies between these two ecliptics, these lines of latitude, a band of land and ocean where, at one time or another during the earth's rotation around the sun, the sun shines directly overhead. North or south of these ecliptics, the sun never passes directly overhead, and of course, near the poles, the sun can sit so low in the sky that it is either day or night continuously, depending on the season.

Not coincidentally, the earth's axis - North to South Poles - lies at a 23 degree, 26 minute angle to the plane of its celestial orbit. We live on a planet that is perpetually tipped, a leaning top spinning once daily, even as it rotates annually around the sun. We also wobble as a planet, the entire earth shimmying on its axis, just as a spinning top will wobble as it loses its angular momentum and slows before falling.

As a boy, I would play with gyroscopes and spinning tops, watching them balance on pieces of string, maintaining an improbable sense of balance, or tracing out spirals as they spun across a table top. You could move the string, and watch the gyroscope maintain its upright orientation, or blow on these spinning tops, and move them here and there. Later, as a teenager, I spent hours mastering the skill of spinning a basketball on the tip of my finger - a useless skill, and time I might I have better spent improving my dismal jump shot. I learned that I could keep the ball spinning continuously by brushing my hand along its side, at its equator, thus adding angular momentum to offset that lost by friction.

To a sailor crossing ecliptics, relying on tradewinds, and watching sun and moon rises, the earth's complex orbital mechanics are easy to witness but difficult to describe or analyze. With my daily exposure to wind and the continual surface instability of the oceans, I am tempted to explain our earth's mechanics by reversing the actual chain of causality. For example, I might imagine the tradewinds of our planet brushing the planet's tropical zones, keeping it moving on a galactic fingertip, with the ocean's rising and falling swells and waves altering our planet's center of gravity, causing a shimmy. In my imaginary universe, I can assign to these shifting winds and waters the full responsibility for our earth's tilt, its spinning, its precession, its wobble. In my less lucid moments, I think that perhaps the scientists have it backward, and instead of the earth's rotation causing the winds, and by extension, the wave patterns, it's the cyclones and rogue waves, tsunamis and floods, gales and calms that push our planet around, change its weight distribution, leaving us all perpetually off-kilter, teetering, sliding close to the edge of the universe, lucky on a good day to be blown back to the center of the table. Perhaps, in our lives and for our universe, our spinning and wobbling do vary with wind and wave, and as we begin to fall, the winds and waves ease, and, somehow, we manage to regain our balance. Nonsensical logic to be sure, but easy to imagine while sailing on these shifting seas, across ecliptics, pushed by winds, buffeted by forces surely strong enough to move the earth. In any event, on quiet mornings like this one, whatever the direction of causality, I am grateful to be part of this ride of a lifetime.

One of my favorite songs is one called Big Blue Ball, sung by Jesse Winchester, with the stanza: "I don't even know where we are/They tell us we're circling a star/Well I'll take their word cause I don't know/But I'm dizzy so maybe it's so." It's hard not to feel dizzy sometimes, sailing on a flat, glassy ocean, the horizon just a slightly lighter shade of blue, hazy in the distance all around, knowing that we're spinning like a top through the stars, leaning over, wobbling, and moving all the while around a sun that seems to rise and fall daily, even as it rests, by most measures stationary, in a galaxy of like stars. Nights like last night, on a calm sea, seem to be the best time to try and grasp the magnitude and magnificence of this celestial reality, to absorb the simultaneous insight of being part of a universe whose scale and scope and complex movements dwarf the human imagination, and, at the same time, accept the unique and undeniable centrality and importance of our own individual existence within that universe.

Reconciling these seemingly contradictory sensations - insignificance and significance - the earth rotating around a sun, and a universe rotating around me - is perhaps the only way to emerge from the sense of vertigo occasioned by our ability to describe celestial mechanics. For even as we describe orbits, precessions, wobbles, seasons, and arbitrary lines of latitude crossed by a tiny boat on a big ocean, we each find ourselves yearning for a self-affirming sense of importance on this planet and in this universe. For me, this paradox takes the following form: I know, in my head that neither cyclones nor rogue waves nor human behavior move our planet, and thus my role, guided by my heart, and as transient and as trivial as it may be when measured against the natural galactic rhythms across millennia, may simply be to help my fellow inhabitants of this fragile ball we call home keep our weight centered, maintain our collective balance, and, against all odds, remain upright.

We're now a hundred and twenty miles south of the Tropic of Capricorn, headed further south still. The breezes become more variable as we move below the tropics, with its tradewinds and monsoons. We're in the southern Indian Ocean, surrounded by an equidistant horizon whose demarcation sharpens as the morning sun burns away the fog, haze, and clouds. It'll be another bright, hot windless day on our boat, on a little patch of ocean, in this little corner of a spinning globe, rotating around a small star that now transits to our north. And even as we absorb these literal cosmic truths, we nonetheless find ourselves sailing at peace in the middle of our own little world, seemingly unaffected by ecliptics and wobbles, reconciling two competing sensations, knowing in our heads that even if we don't matter on a galactic scale, we know in our hearts to keep ourselves and each othered centered, balanced, and upright, doing our best not to get dizzy.
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