We Americans have been enjoying more than the World Cup soccer championship this last week or so. Actually, I’ve got to be honest here, I’m a baseball and football fan, and I don’t think I’ve watched more than one or two complete soccer games in my life. But what we’ve really enjoyed is how much fun the players and the fans have been having over here. For Americans are a cheerful and friendly lot, as soon as you get out of certain small areas here and there. The heartland really is big-hearted, and there’s some of that heartland wherever you go, too — hey, even in New England! Apparently some 700 Scotsmen with their tartans and bagpipes took little Rhode Island by storm last week, and everybody loved them, and what’s just as nice, they loved us right back. I asked myself, “Where would I have taken soccer fans, if I wanted to show them America?” My answer — a bowling alley! Or a Little League baseball game. Or a miniature golf course, maybe one with water slides. Or a good old Greek diner, with sandwiches alone that take up a whole page. And I’d have ordered my favorite, a Monte Cristo, and made sure somehow that our friends from Europe tasted that excellent stuff that comes from the sap of a tree — maple syrup. Have you ever tried to explain to somebody what maple syrup tastes like? I did, once, when an Italian kid from Yale came up to Providence to visit me and talk about Dante. I took him to a diner, where of course you could get breakfast in the middle of the afternoon, and I persuaded him to order pancakes with maple syrup, which he’d never had before. That was something!
Oh, there have been a lot of things to talk about: the sheer variety of places and climates in the United States, the bigness of the country, the states that really still are states and not just administrative districts, the gas stations where you can get pizza, all kinds of things that Americans take for granted, a lot of them fun. But there’s one feature of our climate in the south that Europeans have had to adjust to. It’s hot. And it’s not, in most places, comfortably warm and dry in the Mediterranean way. Houston? New Orleans? Atlanta? Hot and muggy, like soup. That’s partly because we’re farther south, on the whole, than the Europeans are. Europe gets the great benefit of the Gulf Stream and its warm air and waters. But think: Rome is on the same latitude with New York City. Tunis, in north Africa, is farther north than Raleigh, North Carolina. Jacksonville is farther south than Cairo. Miami is a lot farther south than that. And that gets us close, very close, to our Word of the Week, tropical.
Here I can’t speak from experience. The southernmost I’ve ever been? Naples, Florida. The northernmost? Reykjavik, Iceland. I’ve never been north of the Arctic Circle, nor south of the Tropic of Cancer. But I would like to explain here what the tropics are, and why they’re called that — and please pass the knowledge on to your children or grandchildren. The earth, as we all learned in grade school, spins like a top on its “axis,” like an imaginary rod that pierces it from the north pole to the south pole. Actually, the axis itself wobbles, which is why the North Star isn’t exactly in the same position where it was 2000 years ago. But forget the wobble. Suppose you’re where we live in the summer, in Nova Scotia. We’re at the 45th latitude, halfway from the equator to the North Pole. When the earth’s axis is at right angles to the line from the earth to the sun, you’ll have equal days and nights. That’s the equinox, once in the spring and once in the fall. The sun will rise directly east and set directly west. If you’re at the 45th parallel, the sun will get that high in the sky, at true noon, before it begins to return to the horizon. If you’re at the 25th parallel, around Naples, Florida, that’s 65 degrees from the North Pole, and that’s how high the sun will get, on that day. So of course, all other things being equal, it will be hotter in Florida, because the sun will be bearing down more directly, with less of the atmosphere to pierce through.
Now then, with every day after that one, the sun will rise (here in the northern hemisphere) a little further north of east, and set a little further north of west, making a bigger loop through the sky, and rising higher and higher at noon, till all at once that spiral-like motion from day to day comes to a stop. That’s the summer solstice, the summer “sun-stop.” Then the axis will be pointed directly in line with the line from the earth to the sun. Since the axis is tilted at about 23 1/2 degrees, the sun at noon will be 23 1/2 degrees higher than where it was at the equinox — which is determined, as I mentioned, by your latitude. So at our place in Nova Scotia, that will be 45 + 23 1/2 = 68.5 degrees from the horizon. From that point on, the sun will seem to have done an about-face. As you then move through the summer toward the fall, the sun rises closer and closer to true east, setting closer and closer to true west, till the equinox in the fall. And then — well, then the ol’ sun keeps going, making a shorter and shorter course, till he comes to the winter sun-stop and does another about-face.
You’ll notice that the sun is never directly overhead of us in Nova Scotia. We’re too far north for that. But the farther south you go, the higher the sun will be at the summer “sun-stop,” till the latitude where on that one day of the year the sun will for the first time be directly overhead. That’s the tropic, literally, from Greek tropikos, the place where things turn. Since in the north, the sun at that time was in the constellation of Cancer the Crab, the astronomers of the Renaissance called that latitude the Tropic of Cancer, 23.5 degrees north of the equator, corresponding to the Tropic of Capricorn, 23.5 degrees south of the equator. Of course, that’s just the maximum extra height you get in the summer from the tilt of the earth’s axis.
By the way, all educated people in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages knew this. Chaucer wrote about it. Dante took for granted that his readers knew about it.
Before it was shown that the earth revolves about the sun, it seemed that the sun itself was reversing motion, “turning,” twice a year. Of course, everybody knew that the earth was round — that was never in question. Everybody also knew that it got hotter the farther south you went, though nobody in Europe, before Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and Magellan sailed around Cape Horn, knew how far south habitable lands extended, and what the weather was like down there. So, for all our friends in the Antipodes, in New Zealand or Tasmania or South Africa, we know you’ve got your cool time of year now! But for us — it’s time for the oranges to start ripening in Florida, and it’s almost tropical heat and humidity from the Carolinas to southeast Texas along the Gu’f. And for everybody visiting us from around the world, a most hearty welcome from Word and Song!
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