Give up and put your clothes back on

 Here in New Hampshire we have reached the time of year when the house is never warm, but the weather isn't cold enough to justify running the heat. This will fade directly into the time of year when the house is never warm, even with the heat on. Glorious summer had its chance, and decided mostly to skip us this year. I'm not sure where it did show up, but it didn't book a long stay in New England.

In a typical year, May is full of promise and June is full of disappointments. Daylight doesn't automatically mean sunshine. Without sunshine, the relative warmth doesn't bake into your pasty, pale body in shorts and a tee shirt to compensate for the months you've waited. But then July seems to flip a switch. The heat lamp comes on and you can forget the other three-quarters of the year, two-thirds of it with leafless trees. If we're lucky, we get cool nights for sleeping and just hot enough days to enjoy the lakes and mountains. That's the image that everyone carries, anyway. Even before the climate really started to skid out of control, driven by people drunk with power and money, New England's weather had a well earned reputation for variability. You can't always get what you want, even if you're sure you remember it that way.

This summer was an endless June. Frequent rain, some of it so heavy that it caused destructive flooding, gave way only briefly to sunny days before the next batch of clouds arrived. We didn't see more than a moment of excessive heat, but nighttime temperatures were warm, and dew points high. We waited through what seemed like unending tepid gooeyness for brief visits of drier warmth. And now it's over. Daylight slips below twelve hours, soon to plunge faster and faster toward its low point three months away. The sun's angle drops to a stabbing glare when it shows at all.

If we lived in the tropics, the length of day wouldn't vary and the sun would always arc high overhead. A friend who lived in Ecuador for a couple of years said that you could choose your temperatures by changing your elevation. But forget the short, light nights of summer in more northerly latitudes. Forget long twilights, too. So we ride around the millions of miles of orbit ahead of us to get to our next shot at the light and warmth we hope for.

Every season has its attractions. I see people getting excited for autumn's cooler temperatures, bright foliage, and signature flavors. Some are also planning happily for the best of winter, that other highly weather dependent season. Another casualty of climate change, winter could easily turn out to be cold, dark, wet, and nothing more. In that case, there's always hot beverages and baked goods. But just the right  amount of usable snow for a couple or three months would be better for the economy and the scenery. And you'd still have hot beverages and baked goods. So go find the appropriate layers to wear for the moment and face the future.

Remembering 9-11 22 years later

 On 9-11-2001, Americans were stunned and highly offended when, after decades of meddling in other countries and destabilizing them with impunity for our own gain, someone had finally succeeded in attacking and destabilizing ours.

September 11th was a day of horror and heroism, when the few Americans suddenly thrust into the jaws of history met certain death with a sense of duty and service to their fellow citizens, while the rest of us had to watch helplessly. The passengers on Flight 93 and the first responders in New York engaged directly. No doubt the military and intelligence services were busy, but without concrete action they could take. The wider audience could only devour what news we could get, and wonder what would be next.

The recollection of great national unity is a myth. On September 12th I walked into my favorite coffee shop to find people shouting at each other over what country to bomb first. Anyone vaguely resembling a Muslim had a target on them. The culture of xenophobia got a surge of nutrients on which it still feeds.

In many ways, 9-11-01 brought us 11-8-2016. Predictably, we had our chance to be thoughtful and measured in our response, and ran off shooting instead. The architects of the attack knew this about us. While just under 3,000 people died in the attacks themselves, the death toll resulting worldwide is in the millions. Someone needed to die for what “they” had done to us, and it almost didn’t matter who.

Suicide bombers are not noble and heroic. They represent a sickness in the human psyche that comes out not just in spectacular events like 9-11, but in every sad and maddening murder suicide, whether it’s in a small apartment and barely makes the evening news, or a school or shopping mall or house of worship that triggers thoughts and prayers from sanctimonious politicians who intend to do nothing more.

It was never too soon to look inward and reflect on what the 9-11 attacks could tell us about our position and influence in the world, and it’s not too late, although it is too late for the casualties of our long wars since then. We learn to fit ourselves together in the finite space of this planet or we destroy it all in the battle for dominance.

A Dose of Strangers

As dusk settles on a day I've spent indoors, I get restless, looking out the windows at the darkening forest, even if I've spent the day doing useful or creative things. I recall the convenience of living in my grubbiest apartment, nicknamed The Slum, in the Eastport section of Annapolis. It's the only time I feel the faintest twinge of dissatisfaction at living surrounded by nature.

There was a shopping center, my bank, and a post office within a block or two. My commute to work was a five-minute bike ride or a fifteen-minute walk to a poorly paid factory job in a sail loft. I could get home from work in minutes.

Knee trouble had knocked me out of bike racing in the spring that year, so I didn't have the distraction of thinking that I needed to train. That freed up a lot of time. Juggling a couple of unsuccessful love affairs chewed up a few weekends at either end of the summer, but once I got bounced from those I had my evenings and weekends to myself.

My roommate was a racing buddy who had lured me into splitting the rent after his own previous cohab had taken him for a few hundred dollars and departed. Then, during the winter, he moved in with a woman in another apartment complex, where they could actually afford to pay for heat, so my solitude deepened with winter's advancing chill. We had made a pact never to turn on the electric baseboards, and I held to it. I was getting into winter camping anyway.

The living room was furnished with a few shabby pieces and several bicycles. My roomie left his bikes because his new girlfriend didn't have room in her cozy dwelling. The place was poorly lit after dark, the off-white paint of the living room walls horizontally striped in dashes made by the Velox handlebar plugs of four bikes that rested against them. The floor was dark wood. The ceilings were fairly high, although the architecture of the buildings was boxlike and uninspired. It was a great place to go out from, in search of light, life, and possible companionship.

Companionship is a distant ship, a welcome sight when it first comes over the horizon, but menacing in its anonymity as it draws closer. What flag is that? Who looks over the rail as faces become more distinct? The idea seemed nice. Why spoil it with actual experience? I could easily walk to the center of town, to enjoy the bustle of other people's lives while they obligingly showed no interest in mine. I might go to the infant Ram's Head Tavern, when it was a basement dive offering a galaxy of unusual imported and domestic beers, or I might just walk and walk, sitting for a time on different benches, laying out the map of the city based on all that I could hear.

I'd started the practice of walking to town right after college, when I returned to Annapolis after graduation. Annapolis was both familiar and unfamiliar, because of the way my family had come and gone from it over and over during my father's Coast Guard career. I walked from West Annapolis at that point, a bit farther, but a pretty walk, between the Naval Academy and St. John's College campuses, or, often, across the St. John's campus. During firefly season, the walks were enchanted by millions of tiny lights. It was on those walks that I started laying out the sound map, realizing how much of the area I could place spatially from any point.

I would log miles on my evening walks, without thinking about it. Walking is a great way to stimulate creativity and relaxation. Driving facilitates sloth, which can be mistaken for relaxation, but walking provides rhythm, exercise, and flow through the scenery. So does biking, but walking is often a better choice. Especially during the times when I was spending most of my time on the latest draft of my bad novel, or other creative efforts that kept me in a chair for hours, the ability to redeem the day with an evening walk was not only a great amenity, the walk itself was an opportunity to observe other lives and fit these snippets into current or future works. I called it a dose of strangers.

I do have a few dear friends, some of whom I might actually hear from occasionally. I didn't have anything against meeting people, I'm just not very good at it. So, playing to my strengths, I was content to observe, tending to any close passage with a courteous nod and a smile. I did try to kindle something with the young woman who worked the evening shift in a cool bookstore on Main Street, but she deflected the advance. That was still something to file away for possible fictional use, as was everything in those days. I would go home and write for hours before nodding off. Then the alarm would pull me up to crawl from the deep seaweed of fatigue in search of coffee and whatever the day had in store.

In my childhood, my father would go for drives after supper. Like a favorite dog, I would be invited along a lot of the time. But after the gasoline shortages of the 1970s made it obvious to me that petroleum was not something to squander, I wasn't going to drive aimlessly even if I had a car. So here I am now, with a choice between groping in the forest among creatures adapted not only to function but to prey in the dark, or to walk along the road, where hotrodders like to manufacture rubber smoke, and drinkers fling their empties, their driving precision not to be trusted. I don't want to be a lone figure in the headlights even if the oncoming or overtaking motorist is totally sober and sedate. This is doubly true of biking. The advantage of the city was that I could see and be seen without being unusual. And at the time Annapolis had little street crime. There was little to fear.

Hiking is grand. I love to hike. But my night vision was never great, and now it's worse, so I'm reluctant to bumble into a bear or accidentally drop kick a skunk while I'm fumbling around in the dark. And even though I know that coyotes are an asset and don't habitually attack humans, when they sing out nearby it still makes my hair stand up. I'm not going for a walk in the dark. I'll have to come up with something else. Or, as usual, peck idly at this or that until I notice that it's almost midnight and I should have gone to bed hours before.