Written by Pam Postema, Asst. to Yuma GM

September 30, 2014: Kivalina, AK — Though the sun is still shining more than 11 hours a day, darkness has fallen on the tiny burg of Kivalina.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright…

Residents of villages in Barrow and Kivalina, both home to PEBA minor league baseball teams and both above the Arctic Circle, sense the coming of the winter darkness, or “polar night” as they call it. They begin to feel it the first week in August when the sun finally sets after 2 ½ months of circling above the horizon. Long-time residents above the Circle know then what’s coming: the Days of Dark. They sense the imminence of winter again in late September, when the dark lasts longer than the light. And when baseball season comes to an end, Kivalinans put on their long faces in preparation for a long winter.

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light…

During most of baseball season here in the Alaskan League of the Surf & Snow Amalgamation, the sun shines relentlessly day and night. Come the first week of August, the sun sets for the first time in 80 days… and rises a minute later. The sky never gets dark. But by the fall equinox, September 21 or 22, the days are divided into roughly equal periods of light and dark. By September 29^th of this year, when baseball season ended for Kivalina, the hours of darkness had just begun to exceed the hours of light. By the middle of November, the sun will no longer rise at all, and northern Alaska will be shrouded in continual darkness for more than two months.

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout…

This year, for the happy few who call Kivalina home, baseball season was extended an extra week as the surprising Bowheads qualified for the playoffs and swept the first pair of games against the Akutan Island Eagles. Akutan is so far south of Kivalina – 900-some miles – that they never experience 24 hours of darkness or sunlight. Poor souls.

But there is no joy in Kivalina – the Bowheads have struck out.

The jaunty juggernaut of the Kivalina nine ran aground in Angoon, nearly 1200 miles from Kivalina (but still several degrees of longitude north of Akutan). The Bowheads were swept by the Avalanche, and the impending darkness north of the Arctic Circle seemed a lot more impending and a whole lot darker.

Kivalinans stayed indoors, muttered to themselves, and began preparing for the long, dark months to come. They cured whale meat, canned berries, and bottled water. They cleaned their dorm rooms deep in the belly of the stadium that is now their home. They stockpiled reading materials: novels and romances, magazines from the Lower 48, and most popular of all, mysteries. There is nothing a Kivalinan prefers to curl up with during winter darkness more than a good mystery – unless it’s a mouthful of candied salmon. So a few locals sought out their neighbors to swap whale meat for salmon they could cure with imported brown sugar or local honey. And where they gathered, they saw… the stranger.

He seems unaffected by the town’s gloominess. He continues to pitch in where needed – packing baseball equipment away for the winter, closing up concession stands, converting locker rooms to exercise facilities for the year-long residents. When asked, he claims to be a long lost relative of the Swan clan. There are enough of those around that it’s almost plausible. Almost. But the former mayor, the current police chief, the tribal elder, the secretary/treasurer, the city clerk, and water plant operator are all Swans, and none of them know this stranger. None has ever heard stories about a lost white relative.

So, in the gathering gloom, Kivalina ponders two mysteries: Why did the Bowheads lose? And… who is that guy?