Endless summer

My clock just chimed the hour: 3:00 p.m.  Three o'clock on a Northwest Corner summer afternoon in mid-August.  The chime prompted me to check the weather app on my phone:  Ninety degrees Fahrenheit (32.2° C), a recent uptick from the 88 degrees of the past couple of hours.  

A high temperature for Seattle, but not exceptionally high for mid-August.  What's unusual is that it's merely one of a long succession of similar days we've endured this year.  Last week, a laughable 0.01 inch of rainfall technically ended a dry spell of 51 days.  Our usually rainy June was marked by a string of days over 100 degrees, including one memorable day of 108 degrees (42.2° C).

I recall the Northwest summers of my childhood and youth.  Some were "dry summers" and some were "wet summers."  Even the dry summers had days when picnics were threatened, or washed out, by unexpected rainfalls.  I recall standing inside an open door in my garage when I was about ten, watching rain come down in sheets in mid-summer, while lightning crackled overhead.  Yes, we often had periods of consecutive days of sunshine, but just as often we had days with pleasant temperatures, no rain, but a gray overcast.  

A gray overcast -- in winter or summer -- has always been the trademark of the Northwest Corner.

Those childhood summers affected the wiring of the synapses in my brain.  Those sunny days, mixed with cloudy days and rainy days, represent "summer" to me.  Even though I knew even then that summers in other parts of the world were drier or wetter, hotter or colder, than our own.  Just like how, to me, a true forest was a forest of Douglas fir -- not one of pine, or maple, or saguaro cactus.

So this summer, even more than last summer and the summer before that, has befuddled my brain.  Summer is for hiking and camping, but I can't force myself to hike in 90 degree weather.  Well, let me amend that.  I probably could force myself to hike in 90 degree weather in California, or Morocco, or Greece -- but not in the Northwest Corner.  Because this hasn't really been summer.  I don't know what it has been.  I'm ready and able to prepare for rain or unseasonable cold.  I don't know how to prepare -- physically or psychologically -- for hiking in 90 degree (or even 85 degree) temperatures in "my" Northwest.

And so I haven't.  I walk four or five miles in the city in early morning or after dinner.  Beyond that, I sit inside and brood over the injustice of it all.

And so, I was happy to read a column by Margaret Renki in today's New York Times.  Like me, she worries about climate change, about the changes to our environment, about the losses of plant life and animal species that now seem inevitable.  Inevitable, now that experts predict an increase in temperature worldwide of another couple of degrees Celsius, even if we stopped pouring carbon into the atmosphere this very moment.

But Ms. Renki asks us to focus on the beauties of nature around us, and to appreciate them now while we have them.. I infer that we should remember that nature may be very different in tomorrow's world, but that it may still be beautiful in its own way.  We love our fir forests in the Northwest, but we can learn to love the Ponderosa pine that may some day replace them.  The earth will change in the future, but it has also changed in the past.  Only yesterday in geological time, the Northwest was covered with glaciers.  We would have admired them, if we had today's sensitivities, and would have been alarmed at their melting.

We are humans, and humans adjust.  Even to losses.

Renki writes from Nashville that the heat is "monstrous," and the air full of smoke (which Seattle so far has avoided this year).

The air is so thick, I can hardly breathe, but I can feel the breath of the earth on my ankles.  Heat rises from the sun-warmed soil.  Dampness pours out of the drew-drenched tangle of white clover and wood sorrel and mock strawberries that pass in this yard for a lawn.  The earth is breathing.  I can breathe, too, because it is still breathing.

Her assurance is not a cry to give up the fight for a better environment.  It is rather a plea that we not despair, even as we fight for the Earth, even as we see species die out, and forests dry up, and oceans rise.  We may lose much that is beautiful, but the Earth lives on and will create new forms of beauty for our descendants.  

Our own lives are short, but the Earth will endure in one form or another.  Our generation will soon pass away, but future generations will each make its own  peace with a changing Earth.