Did You Feel That?

Author's Note: Minutes after I hit publish on this essay, as if the weather gods were listening, things outside began to go a little haywire. Thursday dawned cooler, cloudy, with the promise of storms. The next few days will be much cooler, especially for August. The pen is mightier, in this case, than the heat wave. 

In late June of this year, just a bit over a month ago, as the summer solstice was being celebrated, Beartooth Pass in Montana got just over 10 inches of snow in a weekend. The storm downed trees, knocked out power, caused travel delays, flooding, and disrupted people's summer barbecues. What might have been a typical cold snap formed into one extremely weird, singularly unseasonal, intense weather event.

In places like Montana, during the correct seasons, snowfall of this degree is as common as mosquitoes in my yard. There have been some warmer winters and some colder ones, cracking the averages, but late June is deep into the year to get this kind of (literally) flakey weather, even in Big Sky country.

Beartooth Pass arises as a topic because we had an incredibly early weather event in my part of the world last week that, despite its place in the seasonal year, was as unusual and noteworthy as the Montana storm. It did not tear things up or stop transportation or electrical service. It was nevertheless profound. At least for me.

For years, I have been thinking about and talking about a change that occurs mid-to-late summer, where the incoming fall season shows itself to be clearly, obviously there, just biding its time. If one knows what to look for, it can be quite a delightful discovery, especially when the days are otherwise endless and oppressive.

In other seasons, these changes can be quite apparent. In deep winter, the blooming daffodils betray the coming of spring. In late autumn, the last of the falling leaves and the arrival of frosty mornings betray the oncoming of winter. Perhaps it is the lack of foliage that makes these changes more prominent in the other seasons. Summer tends to crowd the seasonal changes occurring in its domain with deep green leaves and scorching temperatures, but they are happening.

Going outside right now, you will see evidence only for summer. Verdant landscapes, yellowjackets, mosquitoes, poison mixed in with the English ivy, black-eyed susans popping, the heavy rasping of cicadas, and the swamp-like heat and humidity of the Dog Days. Like any rational person, you would likely pull your head back inside where the temps are reasonable and opt not to go back out until October, at least.

However—and please stay with me here—look again. Try to notice the underlying changes. Gone is the white-hot brightness of June. The sun has taken on a golden light. The sky, when not shrouded with iron storm clouds, has an autumnal cerulean tint. At twilight, you will notice that the shadows are getting ever so slightly longer. Are those crickets? Behold all the little webs woven by hungry spiders on the box elder bushes. There is even an aroma, if you know what to sniff for. The robust, verdant scent of chlorophyll at its ripest.

Practiced senses can (and in my case do) note all these changes in my mental calendar. I'm perpetually looking for evidence. Sure, it's only late July, but the signs are there. Every now and then, too, July or early August renders up a whole day full of evidence of the coming seasonal change. When that happens my heart thrums with the joy of its prophetic song.

Tuesday last week dawned like any other summer weekday. From the windows, appraising the grey light of the predawn world, it looked like summertime. Taking the dogs out to the little grass patch for their morning relief, though, I noticed something refreshingly unusual: it was chilly. 

◇◇◇

In the South, summers begin with a gentle warm up. It can still be cool in the evenings, but May doesn't bring much humidity with it. The days get warm, but only pleasantly so. After a long winter and brisk spring such weather can feel truly welcoming. There arrives the promise of long afternoons in the pool, and by the grill, fireworks and baseball games. The beautiful warmth betrays the coming reality. All too soon, humidity will blanket the land and stifle respiration, cause lots of perspiration and generally make everyone miserable. As the season progresses, it becomes positively, arrestingly swampy. Going outside is like plunging one's head into a sauna. For asthmatics like myself, the air quality declines with the heat and the combination makes it like one trying to breathe on an alien world. 

An 80 degree day in May is warm and delightful. Take a book to a sunny spot. Recline in the green grass. Enjoy the weather. An 80 degree day in July or August, and you just want to climb into your freezer bin and stay there until at least September's second half. I feel this sincerely and keenly. This past weekend, forgoing my usually lovely lie-in on most Saturday mornings, I togged up in my groundskeeper gear and mowed our North Yard while the sun was still low on the horizon. 

Upsetting as this was for the neighbors who were trying to laze the morning away, I had no choice. The yard had become a serious jungle and there were rumors that another heat wave was settling over the region, meaning that the next time I would be able to get out and mow without dying of heat exhaustion would  be weeks in the future.

By the time I completed my work, I was exhausted. It's depressing. At this apogee of the solar year, we could have two more solid months of hot weather ahead. Peppered into this pressure cooker world will undoubtedly be a series of hurricanes that will alternately drench and thicken the outdoors with sultry, bayou-thick air.

So, I did what any rational person would. I went inside, stripped out of my drenched work clothes, sudsed up with Dawn dish soap to kill the oil from poison ivy and dislodge ticks and then put on clean clothes and hung out in the den with Micki and the pups where it was cool and dry. 

My memory, as I sat there pouring over the paperback, kept lurching back to Tuesday morning. Brief, quiet, likely unnoticed, it hung there in my mind. A tiny promise of the future. Cool, calm, autumnal, clear, dry and full of that perfect atmosphere of fall. Was it a devastating snow storm? No. Did it unmoor the power or break transportation? Not at all. All it did was provide proof that, despite the burdensome, potent, blazing summer sun and humidity, the end of all that is coming soon. In a month and a half, it will be the autumnal equinox. Whether fall weather starts on that moment is doubtful, but it will come and then every morning will be as precious, as glorious, as refreshingly chilly as last Tuesday morning was. Since that's all we're likely to get soon, I'll take it in lieu of a snow storm, probably. Maybe. 

I wonder what it costs to fly to Montana?

Break (In) Routine

Our routine is a lubricant that flows into the wheels and cogs of daily life and provides, if not complete smoothness, then bearable vibrations as each day combines itself into its siblings to form first a week and then a month and then, eventually, a whole year. With the passing of each week in that year, we look to the structures of our established daily routine to give us balance, a sense of control, and understanding as each day's adventure unfolds. 

Any actual control we feel we have is merely an illusion. Life brings us challenges every day. Some are major challenges, some minor, some life-altering, some merely pesky but they all diverge from the routine we depend upon. I have come to believe that the routine in my life gives me some comfort when the day turns rough, because, soon it will be lunchtime, or I will clock out for the day, maybe tonight is date night or homemade pizza night, or bedtime is near, when I’ll slip into bed with a nice cup of peppermint tea with honey and a good book to smooth the way into sleep. The seemingly fixed nature of a schedule, especially during the week, really helps me to face the current moment, understanding that regardless if I'm almost fighting dangerous members of the public, or merely cleaning up chairs from a children's event, ‘this too, shall pass. ’

Each day really is like a snowflake, and the schedules and routines we keep are arbitrary, aggravating, and sometimes, downright restrictive. As we make plans (the best laid ones mentioned by the poet Burns) for the future, we strike out into unknown territory, weeks, months, and sometimes years out, placing mental waypoints and milestones so that there is an event to look forward to even though the future has yet to be tainted by the rigors of the present. Such was our family vacation, as we planned it way back in September of ‘24. Well before we ever started packing our towels and swimsuits, we intended to coordinate everyone getting to a beach house we rented for a week of relaxing from routines and schedules.

Making a down-payment on a house on the sand for July, we fixed that moment in the future, but we still had months of routine to get through, so when the whole clan came for Christmas, we collectively looked forward to when we would be together again as a group in just seven short months. To me, way out there in future land, it felt nebulous, ephemeral, speculative.

As the New Year passed and everyone headed home, the longest January on record finally tripped over to February, discussions about “the beach trip” became a universal part of everyone's lexicon. We made plans, bought bathing suits and chairs, and looked happily into the future, trying to imagine what vacation would be like. Each week brought a seven-day subtraction between us in the current moment and the day of departure when we all headed toward the edge of the world where our little vacation spot churned through a family a week in the interim. As time passed, our daily routines began to develop a steady, vacation-flavored wobble.

◇◇◇

Devastating our normal, quiet routines, we crammed a lot into the weeks leading up to departure. It is stunning how fast time seems to fly when you look at it in the rearview. It is also astounding how far up the throttle you can jam the hours of one day as a deadline approaches. The planned things at work, like programs, meetings, projects, due dates and all the regular tasks do add some comfortable stress to the seemingly—in the moment—slow passage of time. Then there are the incidentals, frustrating customer interactions, lost children, broken computers, challenging research questions and almost fights with violent individuals.

Few weeks are ever as crammed as the week before vacation. With fewer than seven days left before everyone headed out to our common destination, it dawned on all of us that there were still a billion tiny things left to do on top of what was, for me at least, an arrestingly busy week at work.

Eight hours of what felt like running, screaming and weeping at work, followed by the horrid, creeping, predatory sense of all the preparation we swore to do in the intervening months (now passed) that remains undone loomed over us. Our lists became unpleasant hornets in our collective bonnet. Add the panic, pressure and inevitably changing plans that forced us to put in another five hours of cleaning, buying, and fretting, it's lucky we managed it all. By the time the Thursday before the Saturday we were leaving, we were all tired, frustrated, ill-tempered and really ready to throw up our hands and call the whole thing quits.

Then, as if the week and our emotions hadn't done us enough evil, Friday dawned and I had to, on top of everything else, take the pups to the kennels at lunch, attend an all-hands meeting, move 700 pounds of metal shelving and close the library. Meanwhile, Micki, who has off Fridays, ran seemingly endless errands, cleaned and packed, prepared for the middle kids and granddaughter to make a stop at our house overnight, got the cats sorted, made several “day of departure” lists and was still cleaning, packing and working on laundry when I skidded home. She was beyond exhausted. I jumped in to help finish the lists, that like a hydra, grew two more items for every one we checked off.

I still hadn't packed or done laundry, the car still needed to be laden with all of our things, and, as if the universe was putting us through Navy SEAL hell week, the Portland kids found out last minute that flooding in Chicago canceled their flight plans and had to scramble to get a new flight. Their updated itinerary meant they would be arriving way earlier at the airport near the beach than originally expected.

Our quotidian routines abandoned us and we were now zombie-like creatures, absently jamming things into a very small and overburdened SUV and unloading things from the mountain kids’ cars. We crashed hard. I don’t even remember setting an alarm.

We awoke well before dawn, ragged, groggy, punchy, echoes of the frenetic few days past still jittering our nervous systems. Details had yet to be ironed out. Our bags had to be jammed into the car. We had to get gas, stop for a biscuit and hot drinks, then race to the airport close to the beach. I will say that 70 MPH feels like snail power when you’re in a hurry. 

Eventually, we made it, and we got the Portland kids and then, in a whiplashing and wrenching reverse of the previous week's panic-inducing pre-vacation madness, we suddenly had hours ahead of us before we could check into the beach house only a half hour from the airport. Unlike its overwrought predecessors, the day stretched out before us, full of promise and nothing on the schedule except waiting to move in and start the week. If you have ever jumped from a hot tub into a swimming pool, the somewhat invigorating shock is akin to what we felt.

◇◇◇

As usual, the first days of a vacation drag. They are so broken from the rhythms of the weeks prior that our brains are undone. Then, midweek, things kick up and soon it is the last day and we're back to thinking about packing and schedules. We consider when we have to check out, feel dread at needing to stuff the cars, hope to get in a final round of putt-putt, several final hours on the beach and then, sadly, with an ache near the heart, check out day dawns. We gave hugs all around, kissed the baby, and headed off to deposit the Portland kids at the airport, after spending some time wandering around in the oppressively sultry heat in downtown Wilmington.

Soon enough, it will be time to pick up the dogs, get laundry caught up, check to make sure the cats are still alive, and then try to settle back into non-vacation thinking. Then, we will begin making plans for our next family vacation, which won't occur for a year or more. Once again, a year feels like a very long time, indeed. 

We'll stand it. There will be other weeks off, other holidays, staycations, weekends with nothing planned, moments of real peace in the meantime. There will also be days when, as if the universe loves to check if we still have the stamina and guts, we will have to face down violent individuals, come millimeters from a brawl, and then force us to sit through a budget meeting as if nothing happened and then go home and pack for a flight.

If time is an illusion, then I'm afraid so are our routines.

In (Bradbury) We Trust

Science fiction is—at least partially—about guessing what the future might look like and then writing something entertaining about it. No one reading these extrapolations truly expects that the author will get it totally right. These are educated guesses, based on how things appear at the moment, and writers of the genre, whether great powerhouses like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, or the many lesser-known bricklayers, rarely get it even close to right. And yet here's the thing: sometimes they do.

Most well-known of the science fiction futurists who got things almost too right is H.G. Wells. In his 1908 story The War in the Air, Wells accurately describes world powers developing fleets of flying machines to build military supremacy and bomb cities. He eerily predicted the Battle of Britain well before flying machines were more than a breathless speculation. So accurate were his guesses (three years before Orville and Wilbur closed the bike shop) that science fiction fans often commented that Wells may have had a real time machine and used it.

Perhaps taking a page from Wells is another author who so closely guessed the nature of modernity that to read his collection of novels and short stories now is to wonder if he borrowed his predecessor's time traveling chair. Ray Bradbury, beloved author of such classics as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, and The Illustrated Man, is a name that has become a byword for dystopian visions of totalitarian futures, planetary settlement, and censorship. The last two on that list have convinced me that Bradbury was no mere author. He was a prophet of Old Testament proportions. He seemed to know what the world would hold as he looked forward, and his tales are shockingly close to reality.

His masterpiece on book burning, Fahrenheit 451, is an incredible story of a future where technology has run rampant, people wish to live in ignorance, and books are the most deadly contraband imaginable. Here is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job it is not to put fires out, but to start them. If a person's home is suspected of containing books, Montag and his firemen go to that house and burn it. The houses are fireproof; only the books—and the people who have hoarded them—burn.

Montag's world is a place of futuristic technologies and mechanisms, but our modern moment, with a few negligible (and perhaps inevitable) differences. Montag's wife has become more and more aloof. Their house has a room where she can meet with friends from all over, broadcast on their walls. She is constantly listening in on dramas or interacting with people from elsewhere. She spends most of her time with “seashells buzzing like wasps” in her ears, even at night when she should be sleeping. How clear a vision of social media and earbuds does one need?

Because of her continued use of these technologies, she has become depressed, unable to sleep without pills; she is a wreck, continuously needing a fix from her fake friends. As she fades, Montag understands that she has become addicted not just to her sleeping aids, but to the constant sauté of electronic entertainment. As people turn toward technology, they become anxious, restless, unable to connect with other people, causing, as Montag sees it, a crisis of connectivity, purpose, meaning, and sense of usefulness.

Along the highways of the future, too, Montag witnesses self-driving cars, which people push to immense speeds, sometimes dying in horrible crashes as a result. Relieved of the requirement of carefully handling a vehicle, the “beetles” in Montag's future take on the role of the driver and so remove the need for care or caution or personal responsibility. Motorists drink and go driving with no thought of themselves or others.

Finally, there are the spider-like mechanical hounds: eight-legged “sniffers” that the firemen use to spy and search out books in people's homes. Ominous nods at semi-sentient technology that has gone rogue, these robotic assassins surveil constantly on the populace and bring back information to the firemen. The hounds can inject anesthetics or poisons as needed, and once a hound is on your trail, there is no way to shake it.

This may seem the most far-fetched aspect of Bradbury’s dystopian future, but actually, it is quite accurate. While the hounds and firemen of Montag's reality are a metaphor for a rabid hate of reading and books, Bradbury knew something about book banning and censorship even in his own modern moment. His novel was—and I'm sure you will catch the irony, not to say hypocrisy here—almost continuously challenged, faced several removals, and was even subjected to a rewrite (called the Bal-Hi version), which removed references to drug use, swearing, and violence. In one complaint about the novel, would-be banners hated a scene in which the Bible was burned (but were okay with other books going to the torch?), somehow missing the author's point altogether. Bradbury hadn't missed the point, though.

As I write this, rabid gangs of intellectually stunted mammals are trying to pass legislation that will give politically packed school boards in North Carolina the right to “pick books,” totally ignoring that school librarians are specially educated and trained to do this task. Other groups, always tiny but loud, are trying to get their own people on public library trustee boards to wreak havoc so that books teaching about history, diversity, LGBTQ+ topics, the Civil War, and the Holocaust cannot be purchased or put on shelves. People are being persecuted, fired, and ruined because they provide certain books. Spies are being hired into the school or library org charts to rat out the details of collections. Bradbury’s crystal ball showed firemen doing this, but the maniacs who want to ban books today are, in a sense, torching our right to read and ruining people's lives in the same way.

In the compilation of short stories called The Illustrated Man, Bradbury envisions a future that is both dark and terrifyingly accurate. In “Kaleidoscope,” a rocket is cut open by a meteor and sends the astronauts inside flailing out into space. Their dying radio chatter betrays their cutthroat ambitions and manipulations until they all plummet out of range. Looking up at the explosion, a little boy dreams about flying rockets one day. In one tale, wealthy parents wonder that their spoiled children's artificially intelligent nursery has come alive as a scene from the African veldt and slowly begin to sense that the lions in the room are terrifyingly real.

My favorite of the series is “The Rocket,” in which an impoverished junkyard owner saves for years to send one of his family to Mars via rocket. However, each of the family cannot bear to go without the rest, and so no one opts to take the trip. In a feat of filial piety and generosity, the father buys a prototype rocket and fits it with screens and motors, and though it never leaves the earth, takes his family on a wonderful trip using their imaginations.

Bradbury’s prose is curt, steely, even brusque, but poetic at the same time. He captures the reader's imagination with intense flashes of descriptions of rockets and forbidding technology and then balances it all with clipped, straightforward dialogue that imitates the materialistic and sometimes fretful ideologies that he holds in critical apposition with his own era.

People in his stories are seldom truly happy. Something is always missing. They are motivated by the desire for wealth or notoriety, rather than discovery or scientific research. They live in pinched societies, wedged against technologies that have tyrannical tendencies and corporations that treat all but the most wealthy as peasants.

There are smart homes, rocket ships, universal surveillance, super-rich villains, egomaniacal leaders, vicious and psychopathic children, overwhelmed alien invaders, ghosts of how things used to be, pandemics of virus and addiction both to substances and one's occupation. In a sense, minus one or two forgivable excesses which are natural to the author and the genre, it feels almost like Bradbury really did borrow Wells's time machine and took copious notes on what he saw.

I'm not aware of any other modern authors (yet) who have managed to capture the present moment so eloquently and with such keen criticism and skill. Like John of Patmos, he gave us a revelation about the future from his perspective. The ills of technology, the lust for power and money, the dangers of blind wealth, and the impulse to explore are all captured with almost perfect clarity. He puts his finger on the pulse of the American dream, eloquently describing the intrinsic fears that motivate, the tyrannical ideas that pervade, and the swollen self-pride that ultimately destroys us.

He gave a hint at the secret of his magnificent futurism in the following quote, in which he both winks and then sharpens his quill: “Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present.” On that scathing note, I offer you one of America's best writers and encourage you to make a foray into his weird, sometimes terrifying, but always terrifyingly accurate future.

Independence Day Thoughts

Dear Readers, 

First, thank you so much for making it through to July with me. It has been a busy and eventful year for us, and the world has been equally eventful and busy. 

I'm writing this week to speak with each of you about this time of year. It's funny to me how, at Christmas, we get very reflective about wishing that we could all be a little more thoughtful, generous of spirit, focused on gathering and spending time with friends and family the whole year. For me, although I think these are admirable sentiments, I would rather we spread the cheer of Independence Day throughout the whole year.

There are two aspects of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the previous generations back to our founders that are worth acknowledging. The first one is to be appreciative of what we have, but the other is to make sure that inheritance lasts for future generations. It isn't enough to take advantage of our freedoms, we have to work to ensure our children and grandchildren get to keep them.

I know that it sounds preachy, but I always feel uplifted by the idea that we have, despite all the challenges we have faced in our nation's history, made it this far. We have conquered both the existential domestic threats and have faced down enemies far larger than the mad Hanoverian king. It hasn't always been an easy or clearly lit path to get here, but we did it. I don't need to list those threats, because as Americans we know what they are.

Each generation, it seems, has its own crisis to manage and ours turns out to be a crisis that threatens the very heart of our nation from within. Make no mistake, it threatens all of us, no matter which party we adhere to or how we worship, or the color of our skin or ethnic heritage. Once unleashed, like all tyrannies, it will quickly take away our rights and put mad rules in place to remove our dearly bought freedoms, morphing this land of liberty into a gulag.

At this time of year, I want to encourage us to remember the other threats to liberty that we have defeated, whether those based on the divine right of kings, or the lunatic assumption that all humans are not equal, or the looming shadows of fascism, racism, totalitarianism, or whatever this current threat happens to be named by history, we always manage to do the right thing. It takes us a while sometimes, as Churchill implied, but we do get it right eventually. We can only win through, if we remember what it means to be an American, not just for ourselves, but for everyone who calls this nation home.

So, as the flags get hung and we break out the red, white and blue decorations and attend barbecues and baseball.games, watch fireworks and splash about in the pool or the ocean, I want to encourage myself and you, dear readers, that we have faced worse and we have managed to survive. Conjure in your mind those conflicts both martial and intellectual and know that, like before, the only way we get through is by standing together in solidarity and fighting for what America really stands for.

That means voting when the time comes, but also talking to people kindly and respectfully across ideological lines. Now is a time of universal national pride, so let's use it to refresh our sense of what really matters: it is not politics or party adherence; it is unity and acceptance.

That is the note I wish to send to you, this week. Please remember, however you vote, worship, participate in this great national experiment, we got this far by fighting for the country we love despite our personal differences, not by losing hope when threats challenge our very existence. Together, we stand, and make America reach her full potential as a place that welcomes and protects. When needed, she is a land populated with fearless people who love her and will defend what she stands for. 

Happy 4th! Let Freedom Ring in each of our hearts and may those piercing tones burn away the corruption, the hatred, the foolishness of politics and greed in the crucible of our mutual love and respect for our land.

Have a great weekend! 

Dave