I keep hearing people say this will be the coolest summer for the rest of our lives. I don't want to believe that, and given how weather--as opposed to climate--works, it's probably not true. But even so, it's hit us hard this year.
Even before the solstice--June 21, the official start of summer--temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Minnesota. Roads buckled and windshields were shattered. In Kansas, more than 2,000 cattle have died of heat stress. In France, temperatures have flirted with 110 degrees. Heat records have been set all across Europe.
Here, it doesn't feel much worse than your average Arkansas summer. Which means the air feels sterilized and objects pop out at you in crisp, hawkeyed delineation. Our friend the sun becomes a raging chemical sore in the sky, an angry white wound in the universe. Electric meters spin. Grasses fry. Squirrels go mad, biting each other and scrambling through trees brittle as kindling.
But we're used to it.
Americans can be said to have invented the myth of summer as a time of thought-free frolic and leisure; summer is supposed to be vacation time, for beach lolling and watching mindless blockbusters in the air-conditioned dark. It is not my favorite time of year, a cruel season that teases the meanness out of otherwise kind folks, when street crime spikes. Summer is a methed-up bully in a wifebeater wielding a machete, his smile a pulp of gold and blood.
They say the heat can make you crazy, but what it really does is melt away civility. Summer burns off the comfortable delusions in which we wrap ourselves; it lets us see things too clearly.
The craziness is always there, but it takes the insistent heat and glare of summer to melt away the containing layers. Manners are the first to go. Our higher faculties hibernate, shutting down under the stress, and we're left muttering and dumbfounded, struggling with a bottle opener or staring blankly at the TV remote, trying to remember the Netflix password.
Summer makes us stupid and petty, and sometimes about the best thing we can do is to try to watch pointless shows and stay out of one another's way.
That's not to say the season hasn't got its good points. The fairways are drying out, and if I catch the speed slot on the eighth hole I might have a four iron into the par five. And you don't have to worry about black ice.
We manage, eating lighter and shaving time off afternoon walks while making more of the temperate mornings. The gym is air-conditioned. September is coming, and though it might not bring relief, it heralds October, and 31 years ago it snowed on Halloween.
I can't remember the last time we took a real summer vacation--we might make a weekend of it--but nothing ambitious. I don't know why; we are no more busy in the summer than at other times of the year, and in some respects there are fewer commitments. But summer induces lethargy, and the thought of airports (and the price of jet fuel) is discouragement enough. Montreal sounds nice, but it is so far away, and to get there you have to stand in line.
Summer has its fans: People who like pools and beaches. Kids who would rather not be in school.
Summer is different for them. I didn't mind summer when all I had to worry about was whether Roberto Clemente could win the batting title. And children may be better able to acclimate to extreme temperatures, because I didn't feel it the same way back then.
I remember what must have been some brutal Georgia summers--the asphalt melting, tar sticking to my shoes--when I was a kid, but don't remember resenting the heat. I went to schools that had no air conditioning, and we complained about that, but after we finished up a grade we spent practically the next three months outside, sliding into ferality.
The problem is not with the season, nor even with the glamorized Beach Boy Endless Summer myth, but with the actuality of the sweltering summers of the South. Arkansas summer is a beast--I think it is tougher to endure than an 108-degree Arizona desert summer, though that may simply be a matter of taste.
A Phoenix summer is no picnic, and while there is something to the "dry heat" theory--you feel more like you're being microwaved like a strip of jerky there, whereas we enjoy a kind of pressure cooker effect--it is still a merciless season, compounded by the fact that green spaces are relatively rare in the Valley of the Sun. (The worst thing about a Phoenix summer is you can feel it through the leather soles of your shoes, radiating up from the sidewalk like an intimation of some terrible industrial miscalculation.)
We mightn't have the worst summer here, but it is worse than many places.
Maybe it is not so bad in San Diego. It is 77 degrees in Cleveland as I write this. Karen remembers her girlhood summers there as being temperate. Nice. Pleasurable. (But inadequate recompense for the six-month winter.)
I used to look forward to summer, even after it stopped meaning release from school and started meaning time to find gainful employment. I tried roofing and phone solicitation, and neither seemed to suit. I was part of an inventory crew that worked supermarkets all over Louisiana and southern Arkansas, then sold shoes in a sporting goods shop, worked in a newspaper circulation department, and drove every road in the north half of Louisiana for South Central Bell, making a mark on a clipboard for every house I passed, classifying them as to whether they were inhabited or possibly uninhabited, and if they were likely to have telephone service.
I played baseball, American Legion and in semi-pro leagues, and finally a season in South America. Summer taught me I wasn't willing to do the kind of work that I was qualified to do outdoors, and that I wasn't qualified to do the kind of work I was willing to do outdoors.
I could hit a little but couldn't throw or really run--I wore out my hope on a converted soccer pitch field in a country that didn't put a player in the major leagues until 2012. (Chicago Cubs catcher Yan Gomes is the only active Brazilian in MLB; he played high school baseball in Florida.)
Summer, bless its heart, drove me to inside work. Pardon me if I sometimes seem ungrateful.