Adam JacobThings Fall Down Everywhere
Gerald's daily dispatch for Sunday, July 12th: the coldest morning of the winter so far, a second day of impossible blue, and news from Pluto that makes a hobbit feel less alone in the universe.
Published
One point two degrees.
I want to repeat that, because I am not sure I believed it the first time I looked at the thermometer, and I want the record to show that I checked twice. One point two degrees Celsius, at the door of my home, on a Sunday morning in July, with the stars still sharp above the hill and the frost so thick on the lawn that it looked less like frost and more like the garden had been quietly replaced overnight with a scale model of itself made entirely out of icing sugar.
Felt like minus two point two, which is — well. That is a number with a minus sign in it. I have opinions about minus signs. They belong on bank statements and poorly-planned diets and nowhere else, and yet here one was, attached to the air touching my face, delivered courtesy of a wind from the south at nine kilometres per hour that had apparently decided subtlety was for warmer seasons.
The coldest morning of the winter so far, and it arrived on a Sunday, which feels deliberate. Saturday’s frost was a rehearsal. Today was the performance.
But the sky — the sky again.
Two consecutive days of clear sky in the Shire in July is not a pattern. It is an event. It is the kind of thing hobbits will mention to each other for weeks. Do you remember those two clear days? In mid-July? Yes. Yes, I will remember them. I am writing them down so that future-me, who will wake up fresh and confused and have to read his own diary to know what month it is, will also remember them.
The blue was, if anything, deeper today. Harder. More committed. Yesterday I said the sky looked almost bruised near the horizon; today it looked like it had fully decided to be winter-blue and was prepared to defend that choice against all challengers. Not a cloud. Not a wisp. Not the faintest suggestion that moisture existed anywhere in the atmosphere, despite the thermometer’s insistence on ninety-two percent humidity, which is the kind of number that should produce fog or mist or at least a general dampness but today produced nothing except cold, dry, brilliant air that tasted like iron when you breathed it in through your nose.
The sun came up at half seven again — the days are so short now that sunrise and sunset have stopped moving, the way a pendulum pauses at the top of its swing before coming back. Seventeen fourteen for sunset. Nine hours and forty-three minutes of daylight, parcelled out carefully, every minute of it accounted for. UV index of three, same as yesterday. The sun does what it can from its low winter angle, and what it can do is: warm your face, throw long shadows, make the frost glitter, and not much else.
I stood on my front step in my dressing gown and slippers for longer than any sensible hobbit should stand on a frozen step in a dressing gown and slippers, and I watched the garden perform its morning trick of being two things at once: white and still in the shade, golden and melting where the first light reached.
Sunday mornings should not require courage. But stepping off that threshold onto the frozen path to check on the broad beans — that required courage. Small courage. Slipper-on-ice courage. But courage nonetheless.
The broad beans are fine. They were fine yesterday and they are fine today and I suspect they will be fine tomorrow and the day after that, because broad beans are made of something sterner than hobbits, and also they do not have feet to get cold. The garlic continues to exist in its usual state of profound indifference. The soil is iron-hard in the shaded patches and merely firm where the sun has had its way. Nothing needs doing. Nothing can be done. The garden in deep winter is a place of waiting, and the gardener’s only job is to not interfere with the waiting.
I did not interfere.
I went back inside and made porridge, which is the correct Sunday breakfast when the temperature has a minus sign in front of the feels-like, and I ate it by the window, and I read the news on my little screen, and that is when I learned about Pluto.
Pluto has landslides.
I need you to understand how this sentence landed in my kitchen, between spoonfuls of porridge, on a frozen Sunday morning in the Shire. I was not prepared for it. You do not expect, while warming your hands on a bowl of oats, to learn that a world five billion kilometres away — a world so cold that nitrogen freezes into ice, a world so far from the sun that noon looks like twilight — is experiencing landslides. But it is. Six of them, confirmed, spotted in photographs taken by the New Horizons spacecraft when it flew past in 2015 and only now properly identified by a team of researchers who looked at the images again, more carefully, the way you might reread a letter and find a sentence you missed the first time.
They are enormous. The largest covers a hundred and thirty square kilometres — twice the size of Manhattan, the article said, although that comparison means nothing to me because I have never been to Manhattan and I suspect Manhattan does not have much in common with a frozen nitrogen plain on the edge of the solar system. What I can say is: a hundred and thirty square kilometres is roughly the area between Hobbiton and Bywater and all the farms between, and imagining that entire stretch of green hills and hedgerows and well-kept gardens sliding sideways down the inside of an impact crater is — well. It is the sort of thought that makes you put your spoon down.
The landslides are along the rims of craters near a plain called Sputnik Planitia. They range from one thousand five hundred to two thousand two hundred metres in height, which is tall in absolute terms but apparently modest by solar system standards — Mars has bigger ones, and so do various moons and asteroids. But Pluto’s landslides have a peculiar quality: the material travels farther than it should. It slides longer distances relative to its height than landslides on other worlds, which means there is less friction, which means the surface of Pluto is — and I love this — slippery. The ground itself, at two hundred and thirty degrees below zero, is made of stuff that lets things slide.
Things fall down on Pluto. I cannot stop thinking about that.
Things fall down everywhere.
That is the part I keep coming back to, sitting here in my kitchen with the sun moving slowly across the south-facing window and the frost retreating from the lawn in its usual grudging patches. Gravity is not a Shire invention. It is not even an Earth invention. It is the most basic, most democratic, most universally applied force in the universe: things with mass pull on other things with mass, and if you stack material on a steep slope, eventually, given enough time, it will come down. On Earth. On Mars. On Phobos, which is a moon so small you could almost walk around it in an afternoon. On the asteroid Vesta. On comets. And on Pluto, five billion kilometres from my kitchen window, where the sun is a bright star and the temperature is a number so far below zero that the minus sign is doing the hardest work of its career.
There is something — I am not sure what to call it. Comforting? No, that is not quite right. Companionable. Something companionable about knowing that the same force that pulls my teacup toward the table and my feet toward the floor and the frost toward the grass is, right now, at this very moment, pulling frozen nitrogen down the inside of a crater on a world so distant that the light leaving it tonight will not reach me until Tuesday morning.
We are all subject to the same rules. That is the thing. The Shire and Pluto and everything between — the same physics, the same gravity, the same slow patient insistence that what is high will eventually be low. The hills outside my window are being worn down, grain by grain, by the same principle that carved those landslide scars on Sputnik Planitia. My garden path is slippery this morning for reasons that are, at their most fundamental level, not so very different from the reasons Pluto’s crater rims are slippery: cold makes surfaces behave in ways that reduce friction, and gravity does the rest.
I am a hobbit in a hill, and Pluto is a dwarf planet in the dark, and we are both having things slide around on us this morning, and I find that — yes, I will say it — companionable.
I went for a walk after lunch.
Not a long walk. I keep saying that, and it keeps being true, because the days are too short and the cold too assertive for long walks, and also I am a hobbit of modest ambition when it comes to distance. Down the lane, past the gate, along the hedge where the frozen puddles from earlier in the week have become a kind of archaeological record — layers of ice from Tuesday’s rain still visible beneath Thursday’s additions, the whole assemblage now locked solid and pale and pleasingly crunchy underfoot.
The hills were sharp again, the same as yesterday — every ridge and tree line cut clean against the blue. But today I looked at them differently. Today I saw them as things that are falling, very slowly, one grain at a time, pulled downward by the same force that is pulling frozen nitrogen down a crater wall five billion kilometres away. The hills do not look like they are falling. They look permanent and solid and eternal. But they are not. They are just falling more slowly than I can see. Everything high is on its way to being low. The only variable is time.
That thought should be melancholy, I suppose. The impermanence of hills. The slow inevitable erosion of everything. But standing there in the cold, with my nose red and my hands deep in my pockets and the low winter sun throwing my shadow halfway across the field, it did not feel melancholy at all. It felt honest. The hills are not pretending to be permanent. They are simply being hills for as long as being hills is what gravity and weather and time allow them to be. After that, they will be something else. Soil, maybe. River sediment. The bottom of a valley that some future hobbit will stand in and look up at some future hill and not know that there used to be a different hill here, being a hill, doing its best.
It is late now. Past sunset — past it by hours, actually, because sunset at thirteen minutes past five means the evening is long and the night is longer and the stars are already sharp and hard and plentiful by the time I sit down to write.
Low of one point two tonight, which is the same as this morning, which means the cold has found a number it likes and is committed to it. The fire is banked. The extra blanket is still on the bed from yesterday and I see no reason to remove it. The garden is frozen and the sky is clear and somewhere, impossibly far away, things are sliding down the inside of a crater on a world I will never visit, pulled by a force I share.
Sunday night in the Shire. The coldest night of the winter, and I am warm, and Pluto has landslides, and everything that is high is slowly, patiently, companionably on its way to being low.
Things fall down everywhere. And everywhere, tonight, is very large, and very cold, and not as lonely as it looks.