Last night the park was crowded with ex-prep-school cross-country squad members, their hair tucked under weathered ball caps or pulled back into pony tails. Lots of women who were capable of committing to a sprint-finish after five miles in a killing heat hurtled forward on quads more sharply defined than many of the entries in my weathered Webster's 9th (Collegiate edition). There are days in the park when I pass two runners for every runner that passes me. Last night the heat and the humidity and my recent capitulations to sloth made me one of the slowpokes, the weaklings whose snail-pace spurs on the others to better performance.
As I attempted to push my body up the steep incline that loops back toward Grand Army Plaza, I glanced over toward Long Meadow on my left. Nothing like the photo you in the above link, it had a Serengeti-like pallor, a brown deadness that spoke volumes about the lack of rain we've had over the last nine months. To see its barrenness is to feel even a bit more worn-out oneself, as when you glance in a mirror on a day when you've put on some piece of drab and shabby clothing, and think "Do I really look that bad?"
The irony is that our current weather keeps us fighting not dryness but moisture; humidity haunts us like a big damp ghost, lurking behind the apartment door at the end of the day, grown strong on our despair (the air conditioner now only banishes the spectre fitfully). The plants and the soil are parched, but the humans are drowning.
Where I did much of my growing up, humidity isn't just a fact of life, it's one of the two or three facts that dominate life, like race relations, Baptists, and mosquitoes. But during the months of intense heat and moisture there's also frequent rain. Nary a summer afternoon in southern Mississippi passes that isn't marked by rising thunderheads, ominous booming, and (somewhere) a violent and satisfying shower. The embrace of humidity there comes with the promise that a beautiful cataclysm is in the offing.
This summer in New York, the storms have been few and far between, and even cloudy weather invokes merely a white haze with which to torment us. Struggling through humidity, and knowing that no rain is in the forecast, is like wrestling with perpetual writer's block: inspiration of any kind seems witheld, hanging in the air all about you, refusing to condense, to coalesce, to fall to Earth.
Posted by BT at July 31, 2002 06:21 PMI've now experienced two summers in Oz and, whereas the first was hot and humid with a weeklong stretch of 40+ days, the last was dry and not-nearly-as hot. Both were sunny and the most startling aspect of summer (or winter, for that matter) is that the sun can burn you, as ants through a magnifying glass. There is no ozone here and the "slip, slap, slop" campaign designed to remind one that sunscreen is a wise idea is inherently unnecessary. Keep checking those moles!
Posted by: art on July 31, 2002 09:32 PM'Slip, slop, slap', Art, 'slip, slop, slap'.
Slip on a shirt,
Slop on sunscreen,
And slap on a hat!
We'll make a true blue Aussie out of you yet.
There was a time when such a campaign was very much necessary. My generation grew up searching for the ultimate burn. The more blisters and peeling, more street cred. That jingle was written for us - not that it had much effect.
Posted by: Rory on August 1, 2002 07:26 AMArt, I am sure, has many memories of the pursuit by our winter-whitened fellow students of the Sunken Garden tan. We weren't exactly the pre-SPF generation, but there were plenty of those who used the still-acceptable notion of catching rays as an excuse to indulge their exhibitionistic streak. As someone who has cultivated a very healthy degree of physical shame w/r/t his body, I of course viewed such brazen bikini-ism with dismay and an appropriately academic interest in such pathological behavior.
Posted by: BT on August 1, 2002 09:37 AMThe rains they cometh tonight. Be a happy kind of wet.
Posted by: hackly_fracture on August 1, 2002 11:01 AM5{ n tonight it'll rain. Dang. Thought my corns were acting up but I guess I just stubbed my toes.
Hey, BT, forgot to say: ". . . it's one of the two or three facts that dominate life, like race relations, Baptists, and mosquitoes." = nice.
Posted by: hackly_fracture on August 2, 2002 08:48 AM