Get out of the kitchen

I can't stand the heat

Today’s accompanying tune: “Girl on Fire” by Alicia Keys

Mentally, I’m here, toes in the achingly cold lake.

I’ve been thinking of this phrase a lot the last few weeks: this is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives. I’ve thought about it while day-time high temperatures shatter all historical records. I’ve thought about it while my dog pants out in the yard well after the sun has gone down, the heat barely abating with any consistency. I’ve thought about it as I drove past a truck driver dry heaving on the side of the road, the hood of his semi propped open and awaiting his attention. I’ve thought about it as I refill bowls of water for local wildlife, trampling through crisp, dry vegetation to set the bowls out. I’ve thought about it as we ride out one of the most intense, longest, and earliest heat waves in California history, all superlatives I’d hoped to never experience in my lifetime. I watch the sky tinged with brown from inside, counting down the hours until the air is breathable again. This, the coldest summer of the rest of our lives.

The way that folks in colder regions get cabin fever each winter, I do each summer. I retreat from the oppressive heat, the sizzling of asphalt radiating long past dusk a reminder of the sun’s work. We are cooped up, left only to our thoughts and pleasant air temperatures brought on by appliances that only stand to make next summer that much hotter. I slather the dogs’ paws with a special lotion that stops them from cracking before their allotted bathroom breaks, pushing them to get the majority of their business wrapped up before 10 a.m. I run fans in every room to keep the stillness at bay, but by noon each day, we’re all about fed up with our confinement. There are only so many siestas one can take before losing their mind, even just a little bit.

Outdoor activities are out of the question, the sun so merciless in its pursuit of heat that daylight hours are the hours of retreat, of stillness, of the indoors. The nearby mountains are experiencing the same heat wave I am in the desert, making their potential for respite unlikely. I watch from my comfortable enclosure as lizards skitter from one shaded area to another, the heat unbearable even to the cold blooded. The silence of the day is deafening — not a single bird calls, not a dog barks, not a human in sight. Those that have to be out and about are enclosed in moving vehicles, ensconced in climate control in an uncontrollable climate that wishes us nothing but harm, it seems. The longer the heat wave continues, the more my fear of forgetting what it’s like to be outside increases. I forget the bird calls, the whistle of wind through the trees, the soft patter of a lizard rustling among dried yucca spines. I forget the route my dog and I used to walk each morning. I wonder if he remembers, is looking forward to guiding me around the neighborhood in search of smells. I wonder if he is afraid of forgetting it, just as I am, all cooped up in the house under an arrest more existential than any before. Because if this is the coolest summer of the rest of our lives, I don’t know how we’ll bear to meet it again next year.

And there will be a next year, and one after that. Each year, I wait for the numbers to tick up and the air to settle, for the sun to assert its dominance over the land, with tense shoulders and an uneasy mind. The anticipation of what’s to come, of our impending incarceration, creeping into every hastily made plan and campground booked. The heat is coming, it is nearly here. Soon, it will be too late to stop it, nothing to do but ride it out, ride out the storm that we’ve brought upon ourselves, the storm of our lifetimes. Heat events are directly linked to human-caused climate change, according to study after study. It didn’t have to be this way, but humans’ insatiable need for power, speed, comfort, ensured that we would arrive here, at the coldest summer of the rest of our lives.

As each summer breaks the previous’ record, we only hasten the season’s demise. Hotter temperatures mean some places now have to rely on air conditioning when they easily went without before. Increased humidity and extreme temperatures render evaporative cooling nearly useless. Mist piped over eager diners on patios evaporates before reaching their warming heads. Our coping mechanisms readily outpaced by the sheer magnitude of heat, of the stifling, oppressive, burning heat. Wind no longer cools when it feels as if it is coming out of a hair dryer or out of a dishwasher nearly finished with its load. We adjust our schedules and routines to rise earlier, move slower during the sun’s hours of assault, and hope to make it late enough to enjoy sweet relief under the stars. We lock in, hunker down, hide away. We inhabit ghost towns of our own making, and the ghosts of our future selves wonder how bad it has to get for us to get the message. If not this, the coldest summer of the rest of our lives, maybe next year it will truly sink in.

Heat is among the deadliest cudgel of climate change’s arsenal, with its pernicious, insidious way. It exacerbates current inequities, leaving those with the least amount of resources squarely in harm’s way most reliably year after year. A car without working air conditioning is a nuisance most days, in the summer it can be a death sentence. Undocumented folks without many job prospects are resigned to work in the sun in agriculture, the best of no available options. Elderly folks, folks with heart conditions, children, pregnant folks — all fare poorly during heat events, even with adequate cooling. Simply touching your garbage cans can result in severe burns. The only equity here is the way heat bakes us all, elevates our temperatures, fries us to a crisp. We all sit under the same sun, the ball of fire that seems to move closer to Earth with each rotation, its affects harder and harder to ignore each time. We can only keep up and forge a series of temporary fixes for so long, one season, one summer, at a time, before we learn that resistance is futile and respite is fleeting. Because, after all, this is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives.

There are temperatures beyond which no living thing can remain in the kitchen, so strong is the heat they cannot stand. Temperatures at which infrastructure crumbles, technology fails, hope evaporates. Airplanes can’t take off, rescue helicopters remain grounded. Cars overheat, asphalt melts. Our solutions reveal their painfully human origins, our inability to think long-term etched into their shortcomings. The same inability to foresee that got us here, to the coldest summer of the rest of our lives, buckling beneath us as we struggle to breath air more suited for a kiln.

And so I will wait, yet again, for the heat to abate, for the birds to return and the pavement to cool. For the sky to soften, the haze to dissipate, the wind to cool instead of incinerate. For the reminder of what life is like when it’s not fighting for itself, its future. And next year I will remember this, the coolest summer of the rest of my life, as the one we barely made it through.

Here’s to staying cool, however we can.

- Megan