Alpena — Looking at a photo of a low sun hovering over blue water, it’s not possible to tell the time. Was the sun rising or setting? The photo can’t tell the story. Frozen in time with the snap of the lens, sunrise and sunset are identical.
Light grows in the morning just as it fades in the evening, played backward. And though they are mirror images, the difference between them is the difference between a swelling wave and a calming sea. Ascent and descent. Birth and death.
We don’t watch the sunrise. We are asleep in our beds as the red light on the horizon turns to orange. We feel the warm light on our back as we fumble with the coffee and check our email. We see the light on the eastern horizon as we sit in our car waiting at a red light, coffee in hand, hair still wet from the shower, on our way to work. We flip down the visor to block out the sun.
At 5:30 a.m., I woke up in Alpena and drove east toward the glowing sky. The grass was still wet with dew. My eyes were glassy and tired. I parked in an empty lot at Blair Street Park and walked out onto the beach. There were no runners, no one throwing a tennis ball to their dog, no one watching the sunrise at 5:59 a.m. Just me and the gulls overhead squawking. The sunrise is lonely.
There is a feeling in the air the moment before the sun breaks the horizon. It’s like a drumroll and a crescendo. As the gold circle rose slowly above Lake Huron, it felt like an opening of the world, because it was. It was the beginning of a new day. It’s here. Time to go. Like birth, the sunrise is new and perfect. Hopeful, with raised eyes. We are alive.
The sunset is, predictably, the opposite. It’s the one we know best. At the end of the day, we get into our car and drive down to the beach to watch that yellow sphere fall. We watch sunset in the autumn when the leaves have changed and in the winter when the pier is covered in a thick layer of ice. We sit there in our modern machines watching the most predictable event on earth.
On Little Traverse Bay, there were cars in the parking lot as night came. High school students in the bed of a jacked-up truck. A group of 30-somethings sitting on beach chairs in a circle 15 feet from the water. Scattered people standing around in beach towels by the concession stand. Kids running on the shore. As the sun fell lower, more cars pulled up, people turned off their engines, rolled down their windows, and waited.
The sunset. It never changes, there are no surprises, it’s always been the exact same way since the beginning. Yet we sit and watch this same event happen, over and over again, year after year. We don’t get tired of this utterly predictable reality. We go down in the summer, put our toes in the sand, sit there, and watch for a long time before, and a long time after. Once the sun sets, the colors really burn. They fade from yellow to orange, then red, purple, and finally blue.
The sunset is a sigh at the very end of the day. It doesn’t say go, it tells us to stop. It’s reflection, not exhortation. If the sunrise is birth, sunset must be death. But it’s not tragic. The clouds come alive with the fading colors. The stars slowly reveal themselves as the sky turns navy. It’s something heavenly. That’s why we watch it. It’s what we hope for.
We must have the sunrise, and we must have the sunset. In Michigan, we get both. No day exists with one and not the other. No life is complete without both. Beginning and end. Sunrise, sunset.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X at @NecktieSalvage.
