DURHAM — There was a year when I watched the sunset almost every evening.
Across the street from the school I was attending at the time began a neighborhood of houses that had been built in the 1950s. These streets and dwellings brought unprecedented order to the post-war town, carving their grid-like stamp into Southern countryside. The streets parallel to the main road separating the campus from the neighborhood ran only four or five deep, and the last street had houses on only one side. The far side of the street faced an open pasture where a farmer kept cattle.
The thin drainage ditch and barbed-wire fence formed an artificial boundary between the built environment and the natural, but it felt like the edge of the world each evening I sat there. Facing the trees on the far side of the pasture, you are facing due west.
I rode my bike to the same spot on that road each evening. After eating in the dining hall and before buckling down with books for the night, I rode through the twilit streets. I made no secret of this cyclical ritual, so occasionally friends rode with me. Tommy once tried to dance with the cows that were dining alongside the fence. Jennifer sat with me one evening before leaving for Honduras. Kimberly shared the sunset with me a few times years before she served and died in Iraq. Leighton, Joey, Josh, and Cathy each joined me other evenings. But mostly I sat there on the eastern side of the drainage culvert, bike on its side next to me, alone. And I sat there to make a daily point of being outdoors.
In the process of describing the physics of sunset, Christopher Dewdney, in his meditation on all things nocturnal Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark
Durham is a green city. It’s flush with trees, both deciduous and evergreen alike. Trees that astound you with color, like the fall fashion show on Wrightwood Ave, or with grandeur, like that amazing hundreds of years old oak on old Erwin Rd between Dry Creek Rd. and Mt. Moriah. Even as we lose acres of forest each year to development, Durham is still a lush environment. All of which mean that Durham is a great city in which to be outdoors.
Bike commuters know that an outdoors activity after work brings a different perspective to daily life. So do the folks who walk the tracks at Shepard Middle School and Durham School of the Arts, as well as members of Duke’s employees’ Live for Life running and walking clubs who walk and run the gravel path around Duke’s east campus each week. The city’s open spaces and trails, from Whippoorwill Park to the New Hope Bottomlands Trail, are designed just for a morning or evening stroll, ride, or skate.
As we come out of the sickly-saturated consumerism of the holiday season, the empty promises of the cell phone and the plasma TV may catch up with you – especially around the time the first credit card bill comes in. These empty promises have to do with buying into the ideas that we need to surround ourselves with electronic stimuli and that everything we need is indoors. But the iPod generation needs to know there’s a life without electronic media.
A recent Scientific American reported that women who worked out regularly had about half the risk of colds as those who did not exercise. Public health officials agree that being outside in sunlight for 45 minutes a day contributes to your health. It strengthens your immune system and is the most efficient way for your body to generate the Vitamin D needed for health.
But absorbing healthy Vitamin D is not the only reason to step out of doors. Since most people spend most of their time indoors, the experience of outdoor environments is a refreshing transition. It does as much for your mental health as exercise does for your body.
How would our lives be different if we each found time each day to unplug and adopt a low-tech outdoors habit like walking around the neighborhood? Why not take an evening bike ride with a friend?
As for me, I’m still looking for a place in Durham to watch the sunset.
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Durham sunset pictures found on Flickr: LaDeeDah Lu, tsmyther, bikinisleepshirt, and elander