| 03 August 2006 Dog Days It is so hot here that you can see the density in the air. Most days I can see from the roof of the bus depot all the way out to Redskins Stadium on the eastern Beltway. Or FedEx Field, sorry, I can't keep the companies that pay for this corporate hubris straight. The haze must be a bi-product of the water molecules in the moist blanket of the air. Looking down at the little park across the street, the homeless folks are just laying on their sleeping bags. The trick is not to move too fast, and to stay hydrated. The heat is not unpleasant, unless you are working in it. In Iraq or Lebanon, I honestly do not understand how they can muster the energy to slaughter one another. The young men that are doing it must be staying well hydrated. Here, I just want to stand and let my tongue loll out, like the dogs and the beasts of the field who can only seek shade and hope for water. The hear is not that bad, by which of course, I mean that it is tolerable if it is optional. I drive downtown in the air-conditioned car, sweat a bit in the garage, and luxuriate in the vast soaring lobby of the Bus Depot as I walk to the bank of elevators. I am being fairly conservative about the energy use at home. I know some others are not, and have the temperature way down. I can tell by the mist of condensation on the interior of the windows. Good help us if the power goes out and this becomes a mandatory drill, sleeping on the balconies, sweating and tossing through our dreams. I have lived in warm places, or places that became warm once in a while. Jacksonville was like that in July and August, and really quite nice the rest of the year. But in the high summer, climbing into the car with the black upholstery after it had been sitting by the hangar at the airfield all day…..well, it was positively religious. Sometimes I would sit there for a moment with the windows up and marvel at the raw power of it, as if I were a chunk of tenderloin embracing the majesty of the roaster. I was in Dehli in October a few years ago, and that is a warm place. I missed the months when the ruling class decamped for the hill forts to find some cool air. To get closer, the Brits had moved the capital there from Kolkata in 1911. I lose my geography quickly when names change. Calcutta used to be a half-British city in West Bengal, where the hot air came ashore from the vast tepid bay. It is really hot there. In the season it would be well over a hundred degrees, and the humidity nearly a hundred percent. Of course there was no air conditioning, but the traditional means of coping was to have drapes made of fiber that could be soaked in water, so that the evaporation would cool the rooms inside from the blazing sun without. They say that the sun pulsing against the dark material produced a dim glow, and with the moisture, appeared to transform the interiors into undersea grottos, the heat contributing to a sort of gentle delirium. I am keeping that technique in my hip pocket in case we lose power at Big Pink, though I imagine all the water will play holy hell with the parquet floors, and there is not place for the servants to sleep who would manage it, except out on the balcony. The weather-guessers are saying that this will only go on for a few more days, and no one is saying out loud that this excursion into the milder side of Hades is just a taste of what we are all going to have to learn to deal with. Only hotter. Robert Frost summed it up pretty nicely way back in 1920, when the echoes of the Little Ice Age could still be felt in New England. He thought a lot about the winter, contemplating the end of his world: Some say the world will end in fire, Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |