The Lazy Hazy Days of Summer

It was over 60 years ago now when H and I drove to Texas where I was to enter the US Army and begin training as an assistant surgeon. On our first day in Texas the temperature was 114º in the shade – what little of that there was. And so it went the entire time I was in training in classrooms with no air conditioning. This was in the very early years of the Vietnam War and, fortunately, I never had to use any of my surgical “skills”.

A couple of years before that I’d been in the Mojave Dessert when it was 128º and there was NO shade. It was on that day when I almost picked up, with my bare hand, a beautiful blue wasp with orange wings known as a tarantula hawk  – these wasps are reported to have the second most painful sting of any insect (second only to that of the South American bullet ant) – luckily I didn’t just grab it.

These two experiences cemented my disdain for hot weather, and 52 years of working outdoors year-round reinforced that feeling every summer.

A lot of folks who live in air conditioned houses, ride in air conditioned vehicles and work in air conditioned environments express a liking for hot weather, I just don’t know what’s wrong with them.

In early July we had the hottest weather we’ve had in years as shown by the thermometer outside our kitchen window –

I know some of you suffer through even hotter days, but that was quite enough, actually more than enough, for us.

Those miserable temperatures are brought to us by southerly or southwesterly winds that also fill the air with crud of all sorts resulting in a haze that makes my eyes sting, this year that crud was augmented by smoke from Canadian wildfires –

The heat’s hard on wildlife too: Birds birds try, just a dogs do, to lower their body temperature by panting –

Deer cool their heels –

While bears, with their coat of thick black hair, often wallow in water to cool off –

It may be two months, or more, until consistently cool weather returns. But the changing climate brought on by our use of fossil fuels is, year by year little by little, pushing that cooling ever further off.