A BIG DAY FOR LITTLE BANTAMS
Why a rooster crows has never been understood. But when the first rays of the sun climb the sky, he's up like clockwork, shakes down his feathers, gulps a lungful of air, and cock-a-doodles forth.
Roosters everywhere are early-risers, conscientiously crowing reveille for the rest of the farm. But in Hammerfest, Norway, roosters live the life of lords. From mid-November until 21st January, the sun doesn't rise at all in Hammerfest. And on 21st January, when it does come up, it introduces a whopper of a day that lasts from the end of January until the end of July.
While roosters throughout the rest of the World go through a daily vocal workout of Pagliacci proportions, the roosters of Hammerfest give one performance a year, if their windpipes haven't wasted away after several months of silence.
The most northerly town in the World, Hammerfest rests on the brink of the Arctic Ocean and is the very capital of the Land of the Midnight Sun. It's about as close to the top of the World as most travellers get - or, geographically, want to get. Time here turns somersaults. There is only one real day in the whole year and only one real night, each about three months long.
The interim periods are stretches of strange luminescence permeated by ghostly twilight. Passengers on the Caronia's summer North Cape Cruise will pass by Hammerfest during the “Day”, steaming on their way to the North Cape. The sun will never set for them in the neighbourhood of the Cape and three o'clock in the morning will be almost as bright as high noon.
The day in Norway is divided into twenty-four hours as it is elsewhere. But in Hammerfest during the “Day” a watch must be of little value. The main meal is called middag, meaning - as it appears - midday. But middag is served at five o'clock in the afternoon. That would put cocktails and dinner after midnight, and a nightcap would be in order sometime about four in the morning. If a hostess in Hammerfest is stuck with the kind of guest who lingers on expecting “one for the road”, she probably starts her new “Day” without going to bed at all!
The most curious thing of all is that, notwithstanding the capers of their cockeyed sun, Norwegians are extremely fond of sundials. Certainly a puzzling affection, for a sundial is an instrument that must be about as useful in Hammerfest as a candle in Hades.
[Produced for the North Cape Cruise departing New York 28 June 1962]