Crazy With the Heat

Heat is awful, humidity makes it worse, and deathly stillness renders it just about insufferable.

The other night my neighbor was standing on his porch. He blew a smoke ring. Next morning, it was still there, though the morning fog had made it soggy so it had sunk to the ground.

Okay, I made that up. But the stuff that really happened was worse.

As summer began, we had a tremendous combination of heat and rain here. This was great for plants (about which more in a bit), but awful for other living things, such as human beings.

As a result of having a good time looking after three delightful and lively children one hot afternoon in mid-June, I’ve recently reacted poorly to hot weather. Not dropping dead the way the Europeans have been doing, but sensitive to high temperatures more than I’ve ever been before.

So when a week later it got very hot and humid here, I sought out the shade and the electric fans I have all over the place, and air conditioning.

The middle of the Monday before the Fourth of July I turned on the kitchen faucet. Nothing came out. I phoned the water company and learned that a pipe had broken someplace. It would soon be fixed, but for the next two days we’d have to boil any water we planned to consume. With the temperature-humidity index (as it used to be called while it was still believed we had working brain cells — it is now assumed we don’t, so it’s called “feels-like”) between 100 and 110 around here, boiling water for five minutes to get a drink made thirst an acceptable alternative. Yeah, stay hydrated. Drink lots of hot water.

Oh, well, it would be only for a couple of days. they said.

I think that the weather people, and now the water company, are often overly optimistic. In January, when it had been below zero at night here for a couple of weeks, the weather folks kept promising a “warming trend” real soon now. They sounded like software publishers predicting the arrival of that long-promised, essential new feature. Likewise, in the midst of a heat wave, the water company said we’d be able to drink cold water in two days. Real soon now.

But no. In two days I turned on the faucet and there was no water. Turned out, there was more work to be done on the pipe. So there would be two more days of sipping scalding water in a hot, humid room made more so. I think that as with the weather forecasters the water company was saying what was necessary to keep us from jumping off the roof as we’re told Russians disfavored by Putin are always doing.

The Sons of the Pioneers could have sold some records hereabouts that week.

And that was before we were told of the disease covering fresh fruits and vegetables such that they would make us into fetid monsters unless we heat them to 158 degrees for a few minutes. Most of the vegetables involved are used to make salads. Cooking them does not preserve their crunchy freshness.

(If Elon Musk were to put his considerable inventive skills to work, he might be able to come up with what we could call a Macrowave Cooler. It would turn boiling water to near-ice in just a minute or two; the second version could put the extracted heat in long-term storage, for use this winter. If he did that, it might make him rich.)

It has stayed hot and humid. And dead calm.

Anyone who has raced sailboats in Long Island Sound knows about calm air in the summer. It is awful. It is hopeless. You know that it will end but you don’t quite believe it — maybe this time it won’t. If you race sailboats in Long Island Sound, you don’t want to read Coleridge.

Yet at 3 p.m., when the cannon fires to announce the race has been canceled for lack of wind, a a cool gust comes in, followed by a firm, constant breeze. Minutes ago you were wallowing like a pig in a bathtub, and now you need a winch handle to trim the jib. This isn’t some old saying or a coincidence. It’s right at 3 p.m. that the sun’s heat on the land has caused the air there to rise, sucking in the air from over the cool water. So if you’re on the northern half of the Sound the wind comes from the south, while if you’re in the southern half, it’s from the north. If you’re right in the middle, of Long Island Sound or the country, you’re out of luck.

In any case, 75 degrees with no breeze is a lot hotter than 85 degrees and a nice little wind. We have had no wind, none at all, for weeks. Even when it has poured rain, it has come straight down. It isn’t cooling or refreshing. If anything, it’s kind of itchy.

And if I’m any example, the heat and humidity and calm turn your brain to mush. On Tuesday I was driving to the grocery store when the flat-tire light came on in the car. I pulled right in to Walmart to get a new set of tires (which I needed, but not urgently). They didn’t have them in stock, but they ordered them and I paid for them and the pleasant fellow who sold them to me squirted some air into the one tire that was a little low. making the light go out. I was almost home before I turned around and drove back to town to get my groceries.

That night I sat at the computer to write my column — this very column, though it was going to be about something else — and I noticed that it was off. I do not know why. I turned it on and it found a place in the boot cycle that it turned out took 17 hours to repair itself. (As with a lack of wind in northeastern bodies of water, a malfunctioning computer, until it is fixed, will surely never work again and all is lost, alas.) But in due course one of the things I tried worked and here we are. Also, an aspect of hot, damp, windless weather is that your sense of what time it is disappears entirely.

It is surreal. Going to the gas station Wednesday morning, I saw a fellow trudging along the road. He was done up like a winterized mountain man, all bewhiskered, wearing a heavy coat and woolen hat, bearing a big backpack. Both temperature and humidity were in the 80s.

I hadn’t quite figured him out — still haven’t — when in front of me was a Jeep, its emergency lights flashing, going forward a little, then stopping, then going some more. I pulled alongside and rolled down the window to see if everything was okay. That’s customary around here.

“I just saw bigfoot!” said the excited woman inside. “Up the hill, in the clearing.”

“Well, I have my camera,” I said. “Show me where.”

“Oh, he’s gone now. He was huge and black and went into the woods.”

None of which explained why she was doing the stop-and-go driving. Apparently satisfied at having told someone her terrible secret, she thanked me for checking on her and drove on up the road.

As John Lennon might have put it, strange days indeed.

What I’d planned to write about is something depicted in the banner picture above: rather than “climate change” causing life to be roasted off the face of the earth, the opposite is happening. The climate whiners (who live primarily in cities, where they are not exposed to life other than rats and pigeons and through which, by living there, they demonstrate their poor judgment) go on about carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, sending the world into a downward spiral. But no, plants consume carbon dioxide. It causes them to thrive. I’ve never seen it as green as it is now. And the plants give off oxygen.

In fact, the plants are growing too well. The woods around here look like the southern kudzu forests, where everything is covered by the big-leafed, fast-growing, starchy vines. (Kudzu starch is useful and good — ask the Japanese. It produces a delicious gel, great for candy making.) Vines here, though not kudzu (yet), cover everything. There’s a grape vine that is trying to keep me from being able to come in through the back door; another has sealed my front door shut entirely. The Virginia creepers are now the Virginia invaders. Of course, the other invasive species, mostly foisted upon us by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have gone entirely berserk.

The annual burning of most of Canada is underway, adding the faint smell of smoke to the heat and humidity, providing the aroma not of an autumnal woodstove but of a damp forest fire.

Oh, well. Tires are ordered. Cold water is available now. Computer is working. The woods are really, really green. I have no reason to complain.

But, as the country folk say, day-yam.