Tag Archives: Summer

Precision

09 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by in Equinoxes, Seasons, Solstices, Summer, Weather

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Running this morning, as I was turning around at my terminus in Cedar Hollow, it seemed to me I was making good time. It also seemed that my run was taking too long; I had other things I need to do this morning. It was a fairly cool and yet humid morning, not unusual for August. We have been taunted in the past few weeks by cooler days here and there, though there’s of course plenty of summer left. Already I am hearing people talk about the fall and its many pleasures. I have a sense that I’d like the summer to be over, as well as a sense that I have not enjoyed the summer enough—have not fished, or camped, or walked in parkland and forest enough. Where has the summer gone? Why won’t the summer go?

In a culture whose summer begins on a day called ‘midsummer’ and whose winter begins at ‘midwinter,’ I’m not sure my feelings are all that unusual. There is always in imprecision in how we define seasons, and in how we feel about them.

The universe is not precise. Despite theories about God as omnipotent watchmaker, the watch does not keep good time, and our timekeeping is a precise system laid over a frustratingly imprecise cosmos. Summer may run from June 21 to September 21, but summer weather runs for as long as it runs: some years, especially lately, it’s been up until mid-October. We gauge the beginnings of the seasons by the sun’s behavior—solstices and equinoxes—but it takes the sun a while to render the terrestrial changes that make for a new season. Given the panoply of other factors, such as wind and rain, that make our weather variable, our wishes for sudden changes in the season are not without foundation.

It’s going to be a hot one today, temperatures in the mid-90s and humid. I’m used to it, the problem is staying used to it, like a lingering backache or a headache that won’t go away. I am going on vacation next week, kind of the high point of my summer, and I am anticipating it with delight. Oh, how I wish the summer would end!

The Flattening, or Remoteness of the Seasons?

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Autumn, Climate Change, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

I have not written anything here in a while. There is a certain irony in the reason. I began writing this blog in support of my work on a book, which I call The Varied God, and which I have been working on for more years than I care to count. Over the past several years, there have been periods of time when I have written more blog posts than pages of the book. Writing a blog is more fun and more gratifying. I can count the number of people who read my posts, and carry on conversations with people who respond to them. That doesn’t happen with chapters of an unpublished book.

In the past few months I have been working on the book more, and it has been going well. I am working on Chapter 5, and since there are seven proposed chapters, that feels like real progress, especially since much of the research, and some of the actual writing for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 is done.

Chapter 5 is about the influence of the seasons on art—music, painting, literature. There is a lot of it, because the four-season motif has been very popular for most of history. There are some outright masterpieces, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Haydn’s Seasons oratorio, and some really schlocky pop stuff, like Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post illustrations.

A book I was reading about seasonal art used the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ which I found interesting. It is the same phenomenon which I have observed but labeled the ‘remoteness of the seasons.’ What I mean, and what the other author meant, is that at one time most people lived an agrarian, largely rural existence. Their lives were necessarily ordered by the procession of the seasons. But as industrialization proceeded and more people migrated to cities and suburbs, we paid less attention to seasonal change. We didn’t have to. Throughout the 19th century, and even up until about the middle of the 20th century, we experienced a great nostalgia for nature and the seasons. Many people made careers of writing books, articles, even newspaper columns about the seasons—Edwin Way Teale, Hal Borland, Rachel Carson, Henry Beston, to name just a few.

But now, most people, and I fear it is predominantly younger people, don’t even have that nostalgia. The seasons are remote from their lives, so remote that they don’t even dress warmly in winter, they just dash from one heated indoor environment to the next. We eat pretty much the same foods all year, do the same things all year. That’s why I use the phrase ‘remoteness of the seasons,’ and while I don’t want to argue the appropriateness of the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ I think it has come to mean something else.

Last week I put up a Christmas tree. It was very warm out, and did not feel ‘Christmas-y’ at all. Autumn was slow to come this year, the trees holding onto their leaves for so long. At the Botanical Garden the other day I noticed a ginkgo tree had dropped all its leaves, but they weren’t the usual golden brown. They were just a tired shade of green. Once the days got chilly enough to feel like autumn, we had another week of temperatures in the 70s. Many people have noted that we are losing our autumn and our spring. We just jump from winter to summer and back again. This is, I fear, an effect of the climate change that isn’t happening. This is, to me, what should be called the flattening of the seasons.

There need to be two terms with separate meanings. Remoteness of the seasons means the phenomenon of people experiencing the seasons less fully because modern amenities have made them irrelevant in day to day existence. Flattening of the seasons means the gradual loss of a full four-season climate règime.

Both scare me.

Montana

18 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Montana, School Year, Seasons, Summer

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I visited Montana in early June, mostly the town of Kalispell, and Glacier National Park, and places with great names like Hungry Horse and Spotted Bear. It is a beautiful state, dead in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. It also has the distinction of being hugely under-populated. A state of well over 147,000 square miles, it just this year passed one million in population. By comparison, my home state of Missouri, only the 18th most populous state, is a little less than half that size and has more than 6 million residents. Montanans are proud and protective of this fact. I saw a bumper sticker that read, ‘Montana is full, I hear South Dakota is nice!’

But they also have a fierce winter. Anyone you speak with can tell stories of shoveling deep snow off their roof to keep it from collapsing. And the winter, at least its effects, lasts a long time. This was June, and when I was visiting Glacier National Park, I found that it was not completely open yet. There is a road called the Going to the Sun Road, which leads from the Lake McDonald area up into the mountains and glaciers. One takes the famous Red Buses to make the trip up this notoriously circuitous road. But the snow was not quite melted enough, and people were hiking and biking up the portion of the road that was navigable.

Perhaps this long winter is why people in Montana (at least from what I observed in the town of Kalispell) love their flower gardens. Everywhere are brilliant early summer displays of iris, poppies, roses, and many other flowers. They favor flowering shrubs—lilac abounds—and even trees that take on gaudy displays, like flowering chestnut, mountain ash, crabapple, and linden.

But perhaps nothing else is more emblematic of their desire to prolong the summer than the fact that their kids don’t start school until after Labor Day. This used to be the tradition throughout much of the United States. It is said that it was because rural communities needed to plan their agricultural activities around the school year, and a beginning date after September 1 was important for that. But it likely originates in other considerations, particularly the problem of asking young students to sit and pay attention for several hours a day in stifling, un-air conditioned schoolrooms. In Missouri, the law says that any district wanting to start the school year before September 1 must hold a public hearing declaring that. Almost all districts now do so, and start as early as mid-August, mostly because they want students to have as much ‘catch-up’ time as possible in the classroom before they take standardized assessment tests (just another idiocy forced on our educational system by ill-advised standardized tests, but I’ll let that go for now).

In Montana, the summer comes on later, and is not as long, and families want the time to appreciate it. They are a hunting, fishing, camping, boating, climbing, hiking-crazy people. They like to be out in it, and they want as much summertime as possible to do that. I don’t suppose Montanans are any less concerned than folks from other states about their children doing well on tests (though there is a strong streak of libertarian-style distrust of federal mandates), I just think that the priority of living the whole summer trumps that concern.

This is just another example of my basic and abiding thesis, that nothing influences our lives more than the seasons. In Missouri, and many other states, we have a long summer that often grows tedious in its heat and humidity, so part of it is ‘negotiable.’ In Montana—nuh-uh. We’re living for the summer while we’ve got it.

Projecting

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in Mindfulness, Seasons, Stress, Summer, Winter

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

I have a tendency—and I suspect many people do—to let my mind wander in stressful situations to some point at which the situation has been resolved, is over, or can be comfortably ignored. The first time I remember this happening was when I was ten years old, and I sustained a bad injury. As I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother holding me, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, my mind wandered from the pain and the fear of what had happened to later that evening, when I imagined my mother would make me tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. I saw myself sitting and eating my soup calmly, the injury bandaged, the pain a thing of the past.

I have been involved in a court proceeding lately, which is very stressful. I was sitting in the courthouse a while back waiting for my attorney to meet me and discuss the likelihood of making progress on the case that day. I projected myself forward to later that night, when I had plans to meet some friends for dinner. I heard the laughter of my friends, felt the warmth of the restaurant, and thought about what I might order. That filled a few lonely moments for me.

I think this is a good mechanism for shielding ourselves from too much stress. Why sit there stewing about the problem at hand if simply projecting our thoughts forward to a calmer time can help relieve the pain? But there is also the tendency, in the extremely artificial lives we lead, to project ourselves out of too much, and into later times, thus robbing ourselves of a good portion of life.

We inhabit a ‘living for the weekend’ culture. We spend 5/7 of our lives pining for the other 2/7 of it. Sure, there are some people who love their work, but it is still work, and can’t compare, for pure joy, to the freedom of the weekend. The irony is that many of us actually do more work on the weekends. I am a library director. People truly don’t understand what my work involves, but my to-do list on the average day includes 10 to 12 items of varying degrees of urgency. But it’s true, it’s mostly administrative, clerical, paperwork. Some of it is even creative work that can be very gratifying. When I lived on the ranch, my weekends were always 8 to 10 hour days of grass cutting, moving hay, turning manure piles, mending fences, tilling gardens, and much more. But still I pined for the weekend as much as a day laborer who would spend his Saturday and Sunday fishing a quiet stream.

We also wish away whole seasons. I really believe that in the most ancient times, humans hibernated, or did something close to it, when the weather got cold. Remember, the earliest Roman calendar didn’t even count the months of January and February, just skipping those days until spring arrived. But for many centuries now we have evolved a lifestyle in which we expect to be fully engaged every week of every month. But both the cold of winter and the heat of summer wear us down and make us weary and longing for something else.

In older times, people had natural breaks in the year, times when activity slowed down. We still celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, both of which are simply modern takes on ancient harvest festivals. But we don’t understand or pay attention to what they are supposed to be about; they are reduced to special days. Even people who post the Jesus is the Reason for the Season signs miss the operative word in that phrase—the Season. It’s supposed to be a season, a time set aside, a time to rest, recuperate. Instead it’s just a holiday, and work resumes the next day.

But our constant activity wears us down. It does no good to rail that this is an effect of capitalist society—which of course it is; commerce must go on and take no breaks!—nothing will change. For one thing, the people who make out best within that capitalist society vacation in Florida and other warm places in winter, or find lakeside houses and other cool retreats at summer’s height. I know people who spend so much time in their Florida abodes that they have surrendered citizenship in their home state. But of course these are options unavailable to you and me, or to 99.9% of the human population, and the boss doesn’t care.

Is it a problem that we wish away the last several weeks of winter? Groundhog day finds even the most rational among us wondering if the damn rodent saw his shadow. Or that we wish away most of the month of August, pulling our sweaters out of storage the first day the high temperature doesn’t break the 70s? It’s all well and good for the mindfulness crowd to urge you to be present in every moment, or for someone like me who obsesses about the seasons to insist that you should experience every season for what it is: in the end, we are humans, mammals who evolved within the seasons on earth. We can adapt to extremes of heat and cold, but that doesn’t mean we like them.

Fortunately we are also the only animals with a brain large enough to permit special functions like daydreaming about better, more salubrious times. My court case will extend deep into spring. My work is full of special challenges at this moment. I am like all of us in wishing for some magical, blessed, almost definitely non-existent time when everything will be better. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day . . .

The Middle of Summer?

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Seasons, Summer

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

There were two stories on the radio this morning about summer: one dealt with the problems families with children face when they don’t have school to send their kids to during the day, while the other was about our summer music playlist. This latter story led off with the announcer noting that we were halfway through summer. Which of course sent me into all kinds of considerations.

There are several different summers. One is the traditional season that begins at the solstice around June 21 or 22, and runs until the autumnal equinox around September 21 or 22nd. If you’re counting what feels like summer, this is the one that counts. In the Great American Midwest, and plenty of other places, the heat and humidity often last at least that long.

Meteorologists have long used a different reckoning, counting seasons from the first day of the first month in which the seasonal pattern prevails. Thus winter is from December 1 through January 31. Summer is June 1 through August 31. But you see the problem with this, which I noted above. Summery weather can begin sooner and run longer. Meteorologists need well-defined units in which to record statistics about the seasons they study, so this system makes sense. If a summery weather pattern persists too long into what they normally deem autumn, that’s something to be noted. (Except, of course, in the United States, where we have politicians to keep an eye on weather patterns, and we don’t need to listen to meteorologists and other ‘scientists.’)

Then again there’s that summer vacation. When a school-aged kid says ‘summer is almost over,’ it means that summer vacation is coming to an end, no matter the weather. Summer is defined by the local school district and by state laws that say how many days of school students will have in a given year. Increasingly summer ends sooner and sooner. It used to be all schools began the day after Labor Day, the first Monday in September. Now school districts are worried that students won’t have enough weeks of instruction before they take their federally-mandated achievement tests, so in some places they start as early as mid-August. But of course federally-mandated achievement tests are an important part of every child’s education, so we have to adjust our lives to accommodate them.

All of these various ‘summers’ mean something to different people. Summer, like all seasons, is a time, but it is also a feeling, and I think we all know summer when we feel it. Like winter, it is a feeling we both cherish and grow weary of. No matter the date, when it has been too hot and too humid for too long, we all pine for summer to be over.

This is, of course, why autumn is the most popular season by far.

Blackberry Summer

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Blackberries, Blackberry Winter, Seasons, Summer

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , ,

If you’re cultivating something like blackberries, the hope, whether you realize it or not, is that you will be so successful that at some point merely picking them all will become tedious. Picking blackberries at my house has become tedious. I was out there until just before sunset last night, and came in with a basket of berries and ten thorn-riddled, purple-stained fingers. Today it’s my wife’s turn, and she’s still out there. I peek out somewhat guiltily from time to time, but I’ve had enough of blackberries for a day or two.

I have made jelly, my wife has made jam, we have both made pies. We looked up recipes today for syrup, preserves, and various desserts, from blackberry upside-down cake to blackberry fool. We are having blackberry arguments–I prefer preparations that strain the seeds out and leave you that beautiful, delicious juice. My wife thinks this is a waste, believing there is something picayune and unmanly about my dislike for seeds stuck in my teeth. She sets aside the seedy pulp that is a by-product of my jelly making, imagining she will do something with it. What we need to do is turn on the auxiliary freezer in the basement and start storing big bags of berries.

Because the harvest is not letting up. Our luck with other things, such as fruit trees and our vegetable garden, has not been so good. Of a dozen assorted trees, only the apple tree has fruit right now, and the birds won’t leave it alone. Our tomatoes are a jumble, and the weeds are winning out over our onions and peppers. We are eating lots of tomatoes, but we are losing many more to rot and worms and other predators. There are some predators, wild turkeys mostly, who like the blackberries. But there are simply too many of them for even the extended families of those gawky birds to make significant inroads on the harvest.

You know it’s midsummer when the berries are ripe and ready to be picked. How many of us recall standing beneath a blazing sun and hazarding sharp thorns to reach that one perfect berry hiding behind leaves deep within the canes? I would guess that any dessert made with blackberries has a least a little blood in it–maybe that’s why they taste so decadent. But it’s not only midsummer that we recognize through the medium of this thorny fruit.

Blackberry Winter is one of the more common names for that point in early spring when it seems like winter has passed–the blackberries have bloomed–and then one day the temperature drops and you’re thrown right back into winter. It’s sort of the opposite of Indian Summer, that patch of uncommonly warm days in mid-to-late autumn. Together these meteorological phenomena are known as ‘singularities.’ A singularity has to happen at least fifty percent of the time for meteorologists to recognize them, and Blackberry Winter does.

Depending on where you live, and what blooms there in early spring, you may be more familiar with Dogwood Winter or Locust Winter. All the names apply to the same thing–even the oddest name, Linsey-woolsey Britches Winter. Linsey-woolsey is a coarse fabric made of linen and wool, or cotton and wool, from which warm, utilitarian garments such as long underwear used to be made. Putting away one’s linsey-woolsey britches is a testament to the belief that winter has passed, and wise people know to wait until after winter’s final blast.

My daughter has mentioned a few times this weekend that she wants to take blackberries to work with her, to share with her co-workers. She says it cautiously, as if I or her mother will say, No way! Those are our blackberries! So she went out to pick her own berries a few nights ago, and was horrified to learn that even the leaves have thorns! For my part, I will be hugely disappointed if she leaves tomorrow without at least a quart of them under her arm, regardless of who picked them. It’s like the bounty of any season: avidly anticipated, relished for a while, and then, eventually, something of a nightmare.

The End of Summer

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Farming, Nature, Seasons

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

There’s this funny thing that happens to me once in a while. I’ll be out somewhere, at a store, a movie, at work, and someone will pass and for a moment I think it looks like someone I know. ‘Oh, there’s Joe!’ I’ll think to myself, or ‘There’s Donna!’ But then I realize it’s not Joe or Donna, but someone who simply looked like or called to mind those people. And then, here’s the odd part, sometime within the next few hours I will see Joe or Donna. It’s just strange, like the occurrence of deja vu.

I experienced the seasonal equivalent of this phenomenon the other day. I was walking up the driveway and I saw, in a gust of breeze, a cluster of yellow leaves flying away. It struck me that I was seeing the first notice of the end of summer, the onset of autumn. But once my eyes focused on the sight I realized it was not leaves, but a group of yellow butterflies coursing over and beyond the barn, really quite lovely, but not the harbinger of autumn. And then, an hour later, while driving down a side street toward work, I saw yellow leaves being blown across the road–actual leaves this time, cast down from a tree and scattering in front of me.

There is a heat advisory this week, with heat indices above 100 degrees. It certainly does not feel like summer is drawing to a close, except in the very cool mornings, before the sun has climbed above the horizon and begun its fierce work. In the American Midwest we usually have summerlike temperatures deep into September, so I don’t nurse any illusions about sudden breaks in the heat pattern. But the cicadas are filling the dusk with their vigorous song these days, and I know that time marches on.

I know I’m kind of new at this, but I am ready to offer one opinion about ‘country life.’ Summer is the season least accommodating to the experience of nature. Why? Too much to do. During the autumn and winter, despite household and barn chores, I found myself on many weekend afternoons dressing warmly and walking through the woods, down paths, across fields, finding out what this land holds. In summer, I spend that time on the lawn tractor, trying to keep ahead of Mother Nature, whose goal it always is to reclaim my patch of land for her own empire. It is a weekly, a daily fight. Then there’s the garden, the blackberry patch, the fruit trees and more that need attention.

Of course, to many people, tending a garden and fruit trees is experiencing nature, but I have never thought so. To me, horticulture and agriculture are applied technologies. Yes, you are on the land and getting your hands into the dirt, but gardening is a matter of controlling nature, not experiencing it. And while spring is about planting and autumn is about harvest, summer is the season most intensely involved with agriculture, not nature.

I will miss summer as it goes by, but I am also ready for the cool days and colors of autumn. Next summer I will do better. I will control the grass better, and grow more fruit, and plant more things in a larger garden. This summer was kind of an experiment. I have all autumn and winter to look back on it, to make plans, and to have a great summer next year.

So Hush Little Baby, Don’t You Cry

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, climate, Drought, DuBose Heyward, Fall, George Gershwin, Ice Age, Ira Gershwin, Meteorology, Mythology, Porgy & Bess, Seasons, Spring, Summer, The Byrds, Weather, Winter

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

The scene is the annual 4th of July Celebration, coming to you live from the National Mall in Washington DC, or from Downtown St. Louis, or Chicago, or Los Angeles–it hardly matters where. The singer is introduced, and she takes the stage. She is white, or black, she is young, or old, she is a seasoned Broadway star, an acclaimed coloratura soprano, a newly-minted pop star–again, it hardly matters. She picks up the microphone, seems to grow misty; the orchestra strikes a somber A-minor chord, the singer draws a breath and sings:

Suuuuuummertiiiime . . . and the livin’ is easy . . .

Yes, again. Just like the singer at this event last year, and the year before, and the year before. As if there is only one song in the entire God-forsaken Great American Songbook with the word ‘summer’ in it. Oh sure, it’s a pretty song: it’s Gershwin, after all, music by George, lyrics by Ira, with supplemental lyrics by Dubose Heyward. That may explain why the lyrics to many of the songs in Porgy & Bess, the opera the song comes from, rise above the usual too-clever-by-half smarminess that characterizes so much of Ira Gershwin’s output. I can only imagine if Ira had written the words by himself. We’d get something more like:

It’s summer in this clime, and though I’m in my prime, I believe that I’m
hearing someone cry . . .

Summertime is a nice song, but couldn’t we just once in a while sing something different? I think singers perform it out of laziness; they want something classic and appropriate, and most human beings have heard this song often enough that they could sing it in their sleep. It’s like singing Amazing Grace at funerals: why bother learning a new hymn? I already know this one.

Yeah, I’ve been in a bad mood for much of this summer, and so have a lot of people around me. It has been a horrendously hot and rainless season. We will all be happy to see it gone. But here’s the thing: it’s still August.

I’ve been browsing other blogs related to nature and to the seasons. I find one person after another rhapsodizing about the coming autumn, about sitting by the fire, about autumn leaves, about donning the warm fuzzies and warming the spiced cider. Come on guys. Where I live, some of the worst dog days of summer come in the first half of September. I’ve seen temperatures in the nineties in October–especially lately, given the global warming that’s not happening.

This hurrying of the autumn season I account to a few factors. First, if you ask people to name a favorite season, autumn is the most popular. Spring runs a close second, but we humans, warm-blooded mammals who developed as a modern species in the Ice Age, feel most at home in the transition from hot to cool weather. Second, we want to see this summer gone. Some people are saying that the summer seems to have just flown by. Where did it go? The answer is nowhere, it’s still right here, still grilling your gardens and melting your sidewalks, and the observation that the summer has somehow magically passed in a trice is pure wishful thinking. Summer is the longest season, averaging over 93 days. Don’t count it out quite yet.

It’s also a bit of wishful thinking that ‘the livin’ is easy’ in summertime. Sure, food is abundant in summer, clothing is light, shelter is minimal. Recent studies have shown that we humans are even more amorously inclined in summer than at other times of the year. But for millions of householders, summer adds a whole new slate of lawn care activities, not the least of which is cutting the grass: an extremely unpleasant task when the temperature is in the nineties and the humidity is high. And when summer temperatures are regularly killing people in our major cities, you know that’s just too much summer. The weather front that has camped out over the entire midsection of the United States for the past eight weeks or so needs to move on.

But of course it’s the sentiment in those first lines that makes the song resonate with listeners. Like there’s some easy-going, not-too-hot season with a plate of catfish in front of us, a rich dad and a pretty mom, and all we have to do is kick back and enjoy it. Yeah, that’s nice, even if it’s not true. Even if it’s really part of the myth making that surrounds the seasons. Like the springtime of young love, or the not too cold winter covered in deep, not too slippery snow, the kind that doesn’t stop our gift-laden horse-drawn sleigh from pulling up in front of Grandma’s house, all redolent of cinnamon and peppermint and Frazer fir.

Maybe next summer won’t be as hot, as rainless. I’ll feel better about all of this nostalgia, readier to accept simple musings about the seasons, my mind uncluttered by realities, or at least more able to set them aside for a moment. I may enjoy simple things like the annual 4th of July Celebration on the National Mall, and no matter what rude beast currently slouches towards Washington–whether it’s Sondra Radvanovsky or Ke$ha–to offer one more rendition of Summertime, I’ll be ready to sit back and let the sentiment wash over me.

Death out of Season

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Autumn, climate, Death, Drought, Fall, Heat Wave, Meteorology, Seasons, Spring, Summer, War, Weather

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Don is this old retired guy who lives across the street from me. We’re friendly in the reserved, non-verbal way of men, but I don’t know him well. Judging from what I can tell by his activities, tending his lawn is his major passion. In green times he cuts his lawn more than once a week. He trims it with an electric weed whacker and fine tunes the job with a hand-held battery-powered unit. I have seen him sweep his yard with a broom, removing those last few blades of cut grass. The centerpiece of his front yard is a dwarf weeping cherry tree which bursts with white blossoms in spring and is a picture of green symmetry throughout the summer.

It’s hardly news that the American Midwest has been on fire this summer. Record high temperatures are being set one after another, in week after week of ceaseless heat and humidity. The heat is worsened by a persistent drought. People are watering their lawns until the fear of the water bill, or the guilt about the waste of water, or perhaps just the realization of the futility of it all finally overtakes them. What can it matter to keep a carpet of green grass growing when your world has become a desert?

On my drive to work, I see ghastly sights of things dying. Flowers at the entrances to parks, the shrubs lining someone’s driveway, trees in the lot at a grocery store, all brown and as dry as old bones. I think how autumnal it all looks, here in the middle of summer. And then I correct myself. It doesn’t look autumnal. Autumn has a beauty and a grace all its own. This is something else.

This heat is just killing plants and trees. It’s not leading them through their natural life cycles, not allowing them to live out their natural lives. As humans we are accustomed through long experience to these life cycles. We measure our own lives in cycles that mimic those of the natural world: the spring of our lives, the autumn of our lives. The thing we fear most is untimely death, which we refer to often as a death out of season.

My father died very young, just forty-two years old. At the funeral, my grandfather sat in the front pew and cried aloud that it should be him in that coffin, not his son. When he too died several weeks later, I didn’t feel like anything in the natural order had been set aright. Still, this is a common sentiment, and a poignant example of how we dislike when our lives do not synchronize with the seasons. Wartime is the most egregious time for our race, since it signifies an untimely end for so many young people. We glorify the sacrifice to cover the unnatural horror of it.

So no, things do not look autumnal around here. They look as dead as things beset by violent forces, like a wartime landscape. It’s a wonder people can keep their chins up, keep smiling, keep asking one another, ‘Can you believe this heat?’ and ‘Hot enough for ya?’ with a chuckle in their voice. It’s how we deal with it, the human communication that helps us handle almost anything life can throw at us.

Don’s weeping cherry tree is dead. His lawn is brown. I have not seen him out much lately: just once or twice, going for the mail then retreating back to the air-conditioned interior of his home. I wonder how he and his wife are taking this heat. I’d like to go over and say something to him, see how he feels. But I can’t imagine what I might say. The trees in my yard are still green, still hanging on.

Driving

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Driving, Fall, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Travel, Weather, Winter

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

I recently returned from a Florida vacation. Nice time, even though Tropical Storm Debby threatened the Gulf Coast for the first few day we were there. We drove down and drove back, a total of over 24 hours driving–including a few wrong turns and detours.

Driving in summer is an interesting activity. I like to have windows down and wind blowing through the vehicle. My wife despises windows down and wind blowing through the vehicle. I’ll admit it can be tiring after a while, but it still makes me feel, even at my age, like a kid setting off on some kind of adventure. Every bridge I cross feels like crossing into something, I don’t know what. I put on my sunglasses, face into the sun, and head south, or west.

I had a conversation (online) the other day with another blogger (Invisible Horse) about how one can experience nature, or the seasons, when one is surrounded by very little that is natural. Our lives are lived in air-conditioned homes, climate-controlled workplaces, heated and cooled theaters and stores and malls. We step outside only to hurry to something else inside. Sure, we can go on occasional vacations to the beach or to the mountains, but what we need is an awareness of nature in our day to day existence.

So I was thinking about driving, and how one of our most unnatural occupations can help us be in nature. This is not as outlandish as it sounds. Back in February, 1947, nature write Edwin Way Teale set out on a roadtrip from the Florida everglades, ending up some 17,000 miles later in Maine at the summer solstice. He wrote a book about this trip, North with the Spring, which was so well received that he went on to write a quartet of books, including Autumn Across America, Wandering through Winter, and Journey into Summer, each based on similar driving tours.

There are two interesting things to note about this: one is the fact that not so long ago a man writing about his experiences in nature could be a hugely popular bestselling author. The other is that Teale set out to experience nature while he drove, but his book was more about the places he stopped and explored along the way than about driving in and of itself. Today we’re always rushing somewhere: it’s not likely we will stop and climb out of the car because we see daffodils in bloom by the roadway. Most of us watch the signs that say Scenic Overlook zoom by unheeded. We blast through miles and miles of forest and prairie until a highway sign alerts us to the next upcoming convenience–more often than not a McDonald’s ‘restaurant.’

Of course driving in the different seasons offers us differing experiences: driving in winter can be treacherous, even though often it is associated with going someplace special for a holiday (over the river and through the woods); driving in summer typically calls for air-conditioning and special equipment, like windshield visors and steering wheel covers to keep down the heat, but it too is frequently necessitated by the need to get to special places–baseball games, swimming pools, picnics and barbecues. But these holidays and summer activities are all human conventions, so if driving to them is seasonally related, it is not strictly nature related.

One of the very few nature-related driving activities I know of is the autumn color tour, where we pile into our cars on a mid- to late-autumn weekend afternoon and head out to tree-lined backroads, just looking at the trees. This is nice, though with our urban environment and sprawling suburbs, we have to drive farther and farther to find the trees. It would be nice if there were other times of year that we got into the car just to go and see what nature was doing. But in the end, this is not what I’m talking about.

In driving, we do and we do not experience the world. A few years my family went to British Columbia to visit relatives. When people hear about this trip they are surprised that we didn’t fly. But I tell them driving is the only way. We traversed and climbed 5,000 miles through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and into the Canadian Rockies. We saw a lifetime’s worth of breathtaking vistas at the height of green summertime. But I have to admit we were in a hurry. We didn’t stop often. We didn’t feel the mountain air, smell the forest breezes: and this was a vacation.

It’s even worse on our day to day commutes. We find ourselves stuck in traffic, impatient, stressed, clutching at the phone to try and reach someone who cares that we might be late. We may be out in the world, this may be the only time today we will experience something aside from the inside of our home or the inside of our workplace, but are we experiencing anything but the inside of our car?

I must admit, I’m stuck on this one. I don’t know what to recommend. It’s facile to say, ‘stop once in a while and look at things along the way,’ or ‘roll down the windows and feel the wind in your hair.’ The first is dangerous, the second is unpleasant for a few reasons–one of them being that we don’t want wind to mess up our hair. Maybe it’s time to solicit suggestions: how can we make driving, which most of us do too much of, more of an activity for being in the seasons?