Saturday, May 01, 2004
I like to rise...
...when the sun she rises, early in the morning...
Today is May Day. In those parts of the world where there are morris dancers, they got up before dawn today to "dance up the sun." It's a tradition dating back to... um, sometime before I was born. I think I can say that much for sure. For me personally, the tradition dates back 20 years or so, to my first May Day as a morris hanger-on in Cambridge, MA.
In Seattle, "dancing up the sun" is usually a conceptual exercise. We know when, according to the weather folks, the sun will officially "rise" on May 1. (It's around 5:50 a.m.) We gather in typically Seattleite fashion (read: most people are running late) at Gasworks Park. It's dark, cold, windy, and often drizzling, if not outright raining. Besides being clad in the traditional "kit" - whites, ribbons and bells - of our various teams, we are usually also decked out in traditional Seattle spring kit: hats, gloves, and a variety of polypro undergarments and Goretex outerwear. The first team that has a full complement of dancers starts the dancing a few minutes before what-we-know-intellectually-to-be-dawn, and we dance until the sky has lightened enough that we can believe that the sun is, in fact, above the horizon. Then we head off to some warm, dry spot to drink coffee and eat breakfast.
Today, however, was a May Day not like other May Days in Seattle. It was not cold. It was not windy. It was not raining; in fact, it was only very partly cloudy. Because there were few clouds, by 5:30 a.m. it was not even all that dark. Dancers showed up sans Goretex and gloves, though in keeping with "tradition," many were a bit late. When our team started to dance 3 or 4 minutes before official "sunrise," it was already lighter than it ever gets for us some years. After a few dances, the sun came up over the I-5 bridge. And people cheered.
Our work being done, we went off to a nice little spot in Pike Place Market to drink coffee and eat breakfast (looking out over a sparkling Elliott Bay and snow-capped Olympic Mountains). And, as it was a Saturday, we continued the festivities with dancing at a park near Pike Place, the edible plant sale at Seattle Tilth and the Best of the Northwest art show at Magnusson Park.
Although May Day this year was different from normal in many ways, it was still bloody early. I'm sleeping in tomorrow.