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The Sun Did It

By Jan Nesset

Going by the comments I receive a farmer's tan is a character flaw - and I need some serious help. My face, neck and arms up to about mid-bicep are ruddy brown and under my shirt I'm a color that hurts the eyes. It's true.

I'm not really self-conscious about showing my chest of bones rippling where muscles should be. Or its glare. I take my shirt off outdoors, occasionally, usually to swim. How else could I have revealed my character flaw? Granted, I don't take off my shirt often enough. To get an even tan, anyway.

Enough already. A farmer's tan, even a very nice one, is not a big story. I'm just more comfortable with a shirt on. And in a year like this - another drought year - I'll get more than enough notice from the sun. We all will. After low to no moisture hitting the Southwest again, the sun and how it affects our psyche during a drought is one of the big stories of the summer.

The sun does affect our brains. The evidence is all around. Today, a particularly hot, dry day with the temperatures in the nineties, a group of five young adults - two or three years into pimples, I'm guessing - entered a restaurant where I was teaching my lunchmate how to eat sushi. It was a business lunch. The kids entered sweltering from the heat, their foreheads beaded with sweat. Maybe the thought of fish conjured up images of cool water.

Opening the menu, one of the young men said, "Scallions, that's an animal, isn't it?" From the concensus of blank stares, a young woman replied, "Yes, a sea animal." "That's what I thought," said the gent. "By the way, how much do you weigh?" The young woman responded with a giggle, "like, 95 pounds." A match made in heaven, I thought.

Too much sun, it hits some of us hard, like salt on a slug. Mid-June, during the 2006 Durango Adventure Xstream adventure race, I began the final leg just behind a competitor who was in second place in the solo mens class. The leg, a paddling leg beginning on the Animas River at the north end of the Animas Valley and ending in Durango, follows a southerly course. And we were starting the leg at around high noon - the sunniest time of the day - heading directly into the sun.

As I guided my sea kayak down the abraided river in Class II whitewater, the competitor ahead worked the same channels in a yellowed-from-sun fiberglass slalom kayak. He paddled a faster boat, but I was gaining on him. Whenever he rounded a corner and turned into the sun, his kayak "spun out," turning out of the channel and into an eddy. It appeared as if the kayak was seeking the shade of the bank, refusing to face the sun. With big effort the kayaker could wrestle the kayak back on course, but the frequent spinning out at sunny turns was taking its toll. Eventually, I passed the racer and his obstinate steed, and began the work of putting distance between us.

From there, whenever I'd round a bend and look back to gauge my progress on the competitor, I'd see the man and kayak fighting one another. Until I no longer saw them at all. That kayak was winning its battle of the sun, allowing me to keep second place. Had the leg been a northerly leg, my place in the sun may have remained third.

Too much sun can cause the strangest things to happen - and minds to wither.

Cover up!