Summer Solstice a Day Just Like Any Other--or Is It?

Sunshine gilded Rocky Peak first and dimmed over San Nicholas Island last as the summer solstice swept hazily across Ventura County on Thursday, the longest day of the year.

Time was marked not in the 864 minutes on the clock, but in moments:

In road workers’ shovelfuls of smoking asphalt. In bright fish hooked flopping onto pleasure-boat decks. In the whirl of bicyclists’ wheels, the beads of sweat on laborers’ arms, the pennies laid onto a Circle-K counter top beside a fistful of candy.

To some, the day meant little--another warm day of work or play.

To the little party of Earth worshipers who trooped to the top of Rocky Peak, it was sacred.

Just a few hours after dawn, the heat haze already rippled up around lizards that scampered across the rocks.

A naked man appeared briefly atop a distant crag and pirouetted on the balls of his feet, twirling a whistling noisemaker overhead with Simi Valley spread out below him. Then he vanished.

Farther downhill, Sharon Roth squatted in shade at trail’s edge, her face a mask of tranquil concern cast down on the filthy blue smog that pooled in the valley.

“We need to realize that the Earth we walk on is very much alive, because man pollutes and man destroys the Earth,” said the 36-year-old telephone operator. “We must live in harmony with all things.”

At noon, she and five friends sat in a chalk circle atop the peak, arms raised to the sun. They passed around a smoldering stone pipe full of tobacco, rosemary and sage. And they prayed for the healing of the Earth.

*

Down in the valley, teenage boys hustled a basketball around the courts at Rancho Simi Community Park, feinting and driving for the basket.

On the grass, Sara Moore and Kelly Mager chatted, Mager dandling her 7-month-old son, Bryce, on her knee.

“I like [the summer solstice] because you can work out longer in the evening, you can go out and run at 8 at night and it’s still light out,” Mager said.

Sun streamed down through skylights at The Oaks mall onto Nicole Crow’s serenely bored face and the counter of her decidedly unbusy jewelry stall.

Around her swirled the clamor of children smearing fingers across touch-sensitive TV screens touting the latest Disney release, the chatter of parents and the beep of other cash registers.

No matter.

“It’s my favorite day of the year,” Crow said, anticipating the barbecue she would go to when work ended at 4. “I love when it stays light out really late. . . . But it also bums me out because I know the days will start getting shorter.”

In Thousand Oaks, four hard-hatted men bolted together a massive crane at the site of a new Amgen building, muscling 2-inch bolts into place with foot-long wrenches.

“Hey, I was born on the shortest day of the year, Dec. 21. I’m six months off today,” offered Jim Phillips, 35. Does he celebrate? A shrug. “It’s just another work day.”

Jim Morgan kicked the crane to life, swinging its 120-foot boom in huge arcs, then making it creep across the dirt on huge steel treads. There was work to do.

*

On the Ventura Freeway, drunk-driving and drug-possession convicts picked up trash while completing community-service sentences. Nervously, they glanced over their orange-vested shoulders at traffic speeding past just a few yards away.

Ice cream vendors stocked up at the dented Pacific Distributors hut in Oxnard for the extra-long evening of sales time, filling bright red trucks and little white handcarts with juice pops, eclairs and drumsticks.

A Southern Pacific freight crawled past, a rusty corrugated steel wall slicing slowly across Oxnard Boulevard.

At Channel Islands Harbor, off-duty Oxnard cop Vince Otani hosed down Yaban-Jin, his rugged aluminum fishing boat. His girlfriend and 5-year-old daughter goofed around in the truck, giggling in the midafternoon sun.

“I’ve been up since 4,” Otani said cheerfully, lifting an icebox lid to show off the silver and yellow sheen of a dozen good-sized calico bass. “It was tough, but we got enough for dinner.”

Two college students home for the summer strolled the Ojai Avenue arcade and jumped to hug friends they had not seen all year.

“I looooove the longest day of the year,” said Farah Varian, 19. “You have the longest time to be with your friends who came home for only a few days because maybe they have to go back to work.”

“It means summer,” said a beaming Shannon Chapman, 18. “We’re going out to dinner tonight at the Ranch House celebrating graduation for two of our close girlfriends from Nordhoff High.”

At Surfers Point in Ventura, 18-year-old Leslie Wooton kicked a Hacky Sack around with two pals.

“I’ve gone, like, eight, nine hours hacking. It’s kind of my way to relax,” she said, rings piercing her nose and purple dye tipping her bleached hair, tapping the beanbag into high arcs with her sneakers. “If I feel [ticked] off, I go out and hack by myself.”

*

Surf was not up. Off-duty Army 2nd Lt. Steve Mohme of Santa Barbara was bumming. “I drove down here where there’s usually bigger swells,” he said, frowning at the listless waves. “This is typical of what it’s like in Santa Barbara.”

The year’s longest sun never really got a chance to set on San Nicholas Island, the westernmost point in Ventura County.

It peeked out of the marine layer around noon, said Navy Lt. Tom Chisum, who works at the remote missile-watching station. But by 5, fog shut it down, and San Nicholas faded into the dusk.

Even with the broad, blue line of the Pacific as its bed, the setting sun on the solstice or any other day is no more or less spectacular there than anywhere else, he said.

“It’s nothing special, no different from standing on the beach.”