April 9 in New York: 84 degrees.
God help me.
Could I hope for some kind of cataclysmic event which doesn’t kill or hurt anyone, doesn’t pollute the air, and otherwise does not interfere with air travel, transportation, or agriculture—and which just happens to cloud up the sky all summer long?
Too much?
Shit.
Where else would I live, except for New York City?
I ask myself this with some regularity—whether to tamp down my restlessness or seek an escape or remind myself there is no escape or a mashup of all of these, I don’t know.
The question popped up again today, in the cauldron otherwise known as the Bleeker Street station. I was thinking of a thread at TNC’s place a week or so ago in which a couple of us rhapsodized over Montreal; another asked But it’s close enough to visit regularly, isn’t it? He had commented late and I didn’t see his reply until even later, and thus never responded.
But what I would have said was: It’s not the same. Montreal is a marvelous place to visit—you should go!—but it’s an even better place to live, so much so that visiting only makes me sad that I am no longer a habitant of that feline city. I could stroll the Main or hike up Mont Royal or point out a chausson au pomme to one of the ladies behind the counter at any patisserie in Mile End, but all that would do would remind me that this is all just a lark, a recess from my life rather than my life.
Besides, Montreal is beastly in August.
No, wouldn’t it be lovely to be in the Gaspé:
Le parc Forillon (M-EveCoulombe, Feb 2010)
The Gaspésie looms over the top of New Brunswick, the St Lawrence spilling out over the top of the peninsula into the Gulf of St Lawrence. It’s by no means the northernmost city in Quebec (that would be Ivujivk, stationed at the northeast entrance to the Hudson Bay), but its furthest region is called “Land’s End.”
My god, who wouldn’t want to escape from the city to Land’s End?
The most famous feature of the Gaspésie is found in the sea off the city of Percé:
Claude Boucher, 2001
You can kayak or paddle out to the massive rock:
Delphine Ménard, 2001
And yes, it really is massive:
archer 10 (Dennis)
Best of all, the average high temperature (according to Wikipedia) in the summer is 68 in June, 73 in July, and 72 in August.
A high of 72. How perfectly lovely!
Of course, to really take in the climate, I’d have to visit in the winter: the average low in January & February hovers around zero, and the snowiest months are December and January, each pulling in an average of 30 inches.
Ahh, trapped in a cabin with a roaring fire during a howling snowstorm at the end of the year at the end of the land: How perfectly lovely!
I suppose I should mention that I haven’t ever visited the Gaspé, so my longing is pure, untroubled. I can dream of Percé or le parc Forillon or the mountains of Chic-Choc and not wonder what I’m missing, only what’s ahead, only what is there.
Yes, it’s August. Yes, it’s muggy. Yes, I got my hair cut.
Yes, I hate everything.
HOWEVER: my heart is not in the hate. I’m working this summer (unlike last. . .) and am thus ensconced in an environment in which someone else is paying to (over)cool the air, and, given that I am working, I can afford to put on the a/c if the weather is still filthy when I get home.
It’s no-drama time. Good for me, certainly, but it does take the oomph out of the hate.
I don’t like air conditioning.
Silly, I know, given my antipathy to summer, and it must be admitted that this dislike does not get in the way of my using my own a.c. (purchased for me by T. and P. some summers ago) or my gratitude for it on the train or at work.
Yes, I’m a hypocrite—sue me.
My friend J., who grew up in Arizona and went to school in Minnesota, didn’t like central heat, something which I, the as-yet-had-never-lived-anywhere-outside-of-the-midwest, found unfathomable. Don’t like indoor heat? Why it’s the greatest: You come in from a snowy day and peel off your jacket and mittens and hat and scarf, kick off your boots, and you feel the warmth seep into you.
That made sense: You bundled up for outside, and when the bundle was no longer enough, you escaped back into cozy warmth. How could that not be good?
But J., I think, looked at winter much as I look at summer: That was a season when you were supposed to be able to roam free, and not be trapped indoors. Arizona in July was like Minnesota in January—brutal—so when the opposite (winter for her, summer for me) doesn’t bring relief, you go after the proxy, that which makes the brutal bearable.
Hm, that wasn’t clear. J. doesn’t hate summer and I don’t hate winter. Neither of us likes our respective brutalities, but we’ve each found a way to deal with them; what we have not found a way to deal with are the seasons which are supposed to be “better”. (Yes, I still think winter is easier to deal with than summer, what with the possibilities of bundling-up versus the limits to stripping down, but that’s another argument.) Summer for me and winter for her is supposed to be a time of weather-liberation, and when it is not, well, we hate the things that keep us penned up, trapped indoors by the sun or the snow. Thus: I hate a/c, she hates central heat.
J. is long back in Arizona, so I hope she’s got her winter mojo back; regardless, she’s likely as calm facing summer as I am facing winter.
I just wish Brooklyn summers were as mild as those Arizona winters.
Ninety-something degrees today, near a hundred tomorrow.
I hate hot weather.
I hate summer.
Summer of love? Fuck that. By July I’ll be cutting off my hair in despair, and by August, I’ll hate. . . everything.
That’s how it is.
Hot, broke, and unemployed.
Yes, once again, I hate everything.
(Tho’ it must be said that we New Yorkers don’t have it as bad as those in the middle of the country. . . .)
Sucks.
I may have mentioned once or twice my. . . displeasure with summer.
Displeasure, hah! Fear, loathing, hatred—you know, the normal responses to sun and heat.
But fall, ah, blissful fall: crisp air, brisk winds, long nights, prelude to winter and all its bluster.
Who could hate the impending onset of weather which chases you down the street and into your apartment? Which welcomes your boots and mittens, gives way to your willingness to test yourself against its cold?
Winter: time of laughter and ease.
Unlike summer, which teases you outside and seduces you into believing the sun is your friend. The sun is not. It tolerates you in June, turns contemptuous in July, and, along with its collaborator, humidity, tries to kill you in August. The only way to survive is to hunker down in a dark space in front of a fan or air conditioner.
Winter respects its denizens; summer mocks them.
What set off this (rather pedestrian) reverie? The heat in the apartment has kicked in.
I don’t even have radiators, but the steam knocks so horribly in the bathroom pipe that it’ll wake me up—and has already freaked out Jasper. (Bean, used to noisy heat, barely stirs in her sleep.) Still, the sound signals the onset of warmth, the invitation to cozy up with. . .all right, I don’t have a companion, but a book or a cat. With a whiskey.
Waiiiit a minute, you might ask: You spent how many words bitching about the heat of summer, how it traps you inside, and here you are rhapsodizing over. . . indoor heat?
You’re clearly missing the point. It’s about an attitude, a set of possibilities, of the ability to carry one’s warmth outside and thus the freedom to move about, unlike in summer’s tyranny, which makes no allowances for bringing the cool with you.
Oh, never mind. You’re a summer person, aren’t you?
Spring is here. Crap.
I have nothing against spring, save that it presages summer—and I don’t like summer.
Let me rephrase that: I hate summer.
Actually, many summer days are fine. Warm, sunny, blah blah. Inoffensive and manageable.
But then there are the days—and weeks—when weather turns vicious, the sun baleful and the air viscuous. I feel hunted by the sun and trapped by humidity, darting from one shadowed space to another, trying and always failing to avoid the heat rays from above.
Plus, I don’t like sticky.
And no, I don’t own an air conditioner, although every year I think, Hm, maybe this year. Now that I’m finally settled in to my own apartment, I think, Hm, maybe this year.
As much as I despair of the heat, I don’t like air conditioning. I appreciate AC, am grateful for it in the workplace, but I tend to think of it as wasteful for my home. And even though air conditioners today are much more energy efficient, and the units themselves fairly small, when I think of a box AC I think of the behemoths of old, rattling away as they suck electricity from the socket and money from my pocket.
When friends from the south would tell me they didn’t like indoor heat, I thought What?!!! How could you NOT like central heating? It’s what makes winter worthwhile: coming in from the cold, face chapped from the wind, and the reassuring hiss of the radiator letting me know I’m home.
I was less summer-phobic (and winter-philic) as a kid, but I like to remember a particular tradition from those winters: My parents’ house had forced-air heating, so in the mornings my sister and I would fight over who would fit her nightgown over the heat vents, the flannel billowing out with rush of warm air. Some mornings we’d rush my brother’s room and all three of us would crowd around his (more powerful) vent until the furnace had had enough.
And no, we did not have AC in the house.
Perhaps my southern friends had their own, fond, memories of coming in from the heat, faces red from the sun, and cooling themselves down in front of AC or vents. I remember comfort; they remember relief.
But as much as the weather can affect the temperature inside, it’s really an outdoors phenomenon. Crazy cold temps are tough to manage, but they are, in the end, manageable. Long underwear, heavy boots, heavy coats, scarves, hats, mittens—they’re the armor one wears to battle the cold, to move through the streets and one’s own life. (And winters in New York City rarely require heavy defense: a decent jacket, hat, and gloves will usually do. In fact, winters here are sufficiently mild that I kind of miss the intensity of the cold of Grad- and FelineCities, tho’ not its duration.)
How can one protect oneself against the heat? Sunglasses, sunscreen, but most hats will simply leave one sweatier than before. And while I can load up against the cold, there’s a limit to how far I can strip down. Naked in New York? No thank you.
I do like the sun. That’s why I hate the summer. In the fall, sun sneaks through the trees and leaves and dapples the ground; in the winter, it coaxes faces skyward, to catch a bit of warmth. But she turns mean in the summer, even sadistic. As much as I welcome her into my home during the other seasons, I avoid her June-August, cursing her relentlessness, her omnipresence.
Leave me alone! I have actually whimpered at the forecast of sunny summer days.
Trapped. Even if I do get AC this summer, saving myself from the oppression of humidity, I’ll still feel trapped, restricted to an oasis of cool.
Summer is my enemy. I dread its approach.
AbsurdBeats 