During this past summer of 2011, I came to several realizations about the nature of summer at least as it exists for me now at 46 years old. The summer has always been a beloved destination of mine for the obvious pleasures of heat and sun, but recently I have started a process to unpack my current feelings about summer and I realize that I kind of hate it. Most people happily think about vibrancy and brightness and heat when they think about the summer – how could I hate it? What I say a key detail here is whether we are speaking about pleasantly sunny days filled with buoyant activity in pools and boats or loaded-down days of never ending heat and humidity that seemingly slows down all life to a steady crawl in stalled-out traffic. Which of these pictures is the correct one when it comes to summer in New England? Obviously, we get a fair share of both of these scenarios.
Let's look to Europe for a more dire example concerning the intense heat of summer. It is a fact that literally tens of thousands of seniors died during the heatwave that choked all of Europe during the summer of 2003. This is a staggering statistic; I doubt that any of the casualties were listening to the Beach Boys sing about endless summer as they expired in a puddle of sweat. They probably all cursed the summer during those fatal weeks. So much for the joy of summer. Clearly, summertime can be as deadly as a frosty winter. This is a detail about summer living that is often overlooked as nature is in full bloom and people take in the beautiful flowers and skies.
Summer, then, to an educated adult should appear to have very real dangers about it even as the sun rises early and provides energy during the long brightly lit days. The idea of a perfectly lovely summer of manageable heat, though, seems to be a kind of fantasy unless we are discussing something exotic like an island in the Caribbean. It is a fact that here in the Northeastern United States we have been experiencing hotter and hotter summers over the last decade. New York City this summer of 2011 had weeks of over ninety-five degrees that caused havoc in individual lives as well as in the lives of city administrators hoping to correct for this change in the weather. Many people died as a result of the heatwave. It was considered a heat emergency. Whether in a big city like New York or in a smaller town, when it gets too hot to go outside and to sleep at night most people are in trouble.
All is not a summer cruise catalog in July -- there are many health hazards knocking upon our summer doorsteps and we must become vigilant to at least not die of heatstroke or sun exposure never mind the possibility of developing skin cancer from over tanning as we negotiate the summer months. If our summer lifestyle allows us plenty of swimming, access to air conditioning and time away from the sun, then we are in good shape. For a summer road asphalt crew, the sun is a daily menace and the intense heat is always there as almost a sentient enemy. For some outdoor professions, summer is nothing but a battlefield and survival is not always easy or assured.
In continuing with this theme of summer survival, I will relate that I am an adjunct lecturer working for many local colleges in the Burlington, Vermont area and I am often forced to take whatever classes I can get to teach in order to keep up some kind of income stream during the summer months, which is ironically much slower than the spring or fall – all that fantastic sunshine doesn't make people excited to sit in the classroom. Sometimes particular classes don't fill up with enough summer students and I am forced to look down other avenues for summer employment. My summer employment has usually involved tennis instruction, telemarketing, working for cleaning services and the like. As I have gotten involved in these kinds of positions, I have found that they have not only stressed me out due to their temporary natures, which comes with the territory of seasonal employment, but that they also tend to make the summer into one long waiting game, especially if the job is really unpleasant. And this is a horrible personal reality indeed because you feel the cognitive dissonance of waiting for the summer all year long (especially in frigid Vermont) and then suddenly really just wanting it to be over, so "real life" can begin. To me summer is a complicated season indeed and never really a perfect season of happiness as summer marketing campaigns would have us believe. Sure the fruits and vegetables that we consume are fresh, but they come to us with a price. It is also easy to feel guilty if you are not having “a great summer.” What's wrong with you!
In the jazz standard "Summertime" by George Gershwin, the sentiment of "summertime and the livin' is easy" I took as gospel for decades in my earlier years, but today I don't buy it at all. For my money, summertime existence is just plain tough on many levels even if they are not so visible.
I consider myself to be a connoisseur of air, which is one of the reasons I live in Vermont and I do not enjoy city living. My wife hates that I need every window open and every blind drawn. Fresh air I believe to be the very elixir of a healthy life with clean water coming in as a close second. Generally the air quality of April, May and June is just heavenly in Vermont -- it feels like a return to Eden … but come late July and August, the heat and humidity mix creating more of a tired and heavy ether that surely can be breathed, but it is a tired oxygen to be sure with a kind of fatigue at its core. By August, as far as I am concerned, the air is just plain stagnant and old -- the best of the summer season has passed and now we await the energy spike of the next season, fall. The spirited human feeling of April, May, and June tends to be about optimism in looking forward to the coming summer and this most often involves the beginning of new projects and directions and action -- in short, we are looking at hope plain and simple. By August, all the idealism is gone from our summer plans and in their place stands experienced realism and this is quite a different animal from the innocent young sparrow still kicking around in the spring nest. By August we know if the summer has been great or just so so.
The possibilities of a future season are so important for humans -- looking ahead with positivity is the key to any form of optimism. It would seem that late summer creates a strange waiting game that can only be resolved once the fall arrives. Late summer seems to be a kind of suspended animation, which for my money is as depressing as the early rains of November. It feels like nothing is moving whatsoever and this can certainly be a terrible feeling.
During the end of August the crickets go mad at night as they try to shout out a warning that a future season is on the way, yet it isn't here right now. Strangely, there has been much doubt about the present national economy within the media and much discussion about when will there be new movement in job growth and hiring. The Obama economic plan seems frozen. Well, it seems pretty obvious that sudden job growth and new hiring will not be happening as summer is slowly in a winding down pattern. August seems an especially heavy month because it seems slow to move towards September -- perhaps we are all collectively holding this change back, yet it is inevitable. The Beach Boy vibe of endless summer is over.
Summer has its fair share of nuisances and hazards that just don't exist during any other season. During the past 2 summers I have had a young daughter and son to take care of and my daughter has just been decimated by mosquito bites. The bites swell up into mythic proportions and on occasion become infected. So in addition to the numerous sunscreen applications that have to be applied several times a day to filter out the poisonous sun from the blond twins, insect repellant has also to be applied all over them often and with attention to detail. How, then, with these extra chores that are so very necessary can we make the case that summer is a season of ease? By the afternoon every lotion applied to the children has combined with the free flowing sweat into a kind of summer jelly. Then begins the series of baths and showers to cool down. Summer is actually not carefree in the least and it seems to demand careful planning in order to survive it to the end of the powerful heat cycle.
On the surface summer certainly seems to somehow be connected to the idea that there should be constant fun during this luminous season. I would beg to claim the opposite. Special arrangements have to continually be made in order to negotiate this season successfully and it is my contention that the extreme planning that takes place in the summer is both painful and anxiety causing at least for me. As the heat and fecundity of the season blast away at the human body, I, for one, have the need to be in constant movement, there exists the impulse to run, swim, and play tennis so as to explore every inch of summer fun and now as a father of twins I feel a double anxiety to run in every direction in order to provide the kids with all kinds of new experiences as well. The week becomes a long list from tennis lesson to an exploratory hike to swimming to getting a snorkel in and this all has to happen even as the average adult is working a forty-hour-plus week. This kind of manic energy use certainly drives me crazy and I wonder if on the spectrum this isn't worse than the depression of winter during which energy conservation is actually happening quite effectively thank you. A gorgeous summer sets up a paradigm of having to experience so much at one time that these kinds of hopes just can't possibly be reached. Summer is most often a season of expectations, a weird kind of Walt Disney Christmas that is based upon sheer fantasy.
I would be remiss not to mention that summer brings with it very specific expectations from our childhood. I certainly feel that every summer I try to match up to the thrilling childhood memories of summer as I grew up in rural New Jersey by the shores of a lake. Every moment spent at that lake just seemed so magical that I am forever trying to recreate at least a few of those feelings of wonderment and discovery; behind every log or lily pad was a new creature. Although today I realize many of the profound dysfunctions of my childhood, there is something about capturing those early summer experiences “just one more time”. As a young boy what I enjoyed most was really time spent fishing or observing nature from the row boat or from behind the swim mask as I snorkeled. Missing of course was what my father had to go through to pay for that experience and that is precisely why I stress how childhood can ultimately not be recaptured ever because once you are no longer a child you will be incapable of having that blind spot that makes you concentrate on being innocent and not on what real world actions are paying your way. In this way we can never again experience the bounty of summer by just hanging out and taking in life. The summer of childhood can never come again unless you are perhaps very wealthy and on constant medication.
Perhaps the most soul destroying pain of summer relates ironically to its end. Most people dread the end of summer because it is a definite signal to begin going inward as opposed to jumping from one outward activity with lots of people to another with even more people. The cocktail parties tend to end come fall. I have a feeling that real deep thinking does not tend to happen in the middle of summer. There is simply too much light and social energy drifting around for people to begin answering deep questions about their life paths. As the sound of loons and geese flood the late August nights – the time of plenty is winding down and it is time to face a more realistic season of loss that proves to be a metaphor for the aging process itself. Another summer behind and another winter ahead is indeed a sobering judgment to come to grips with.
I hate summer. It is too full of contradictions to be an enjoyable season for me and I know too well how easy it was to enjoy summers when I was much younger and that truly was decades ago.
