Never Summer

Climate change has turned the season of endless play to one of constant worry.

As a kid growing up in the late 1980s and early ’90s, summer was a dreamland of unstructured hours of unobstructed play: riding bikes, feeding ducks in the park, playing video games in air-conditioned malls. Summer was my favorite season. Days felt the way DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s song “Summertime” sounded. 

More recently, though, climate change has made summer the season of ecological dread. Forest fires, withering droughts, punishing heat waves — now, every summer day adds more to the ledger of climate disasters. Melting icecaps and ocean acidification scared you? An hour before I typed this, CNN published an article titled “The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, new research shows.” 

This summer’s bad news is of historic proportions. Arizona’s Lake Mead reservoir, which helps supply water to 40 million people, has dropped to its lowest levels since 1937. Europe is suffering its hottest summer on record. Britain is enduring its highest recorded temperature: 104.5˚F, or 40.3˚ C. Heat has disrupted rail networks, grounded flights and caused fires across Europe. Heat and drought have shifted the headwaters of England’s famed Thames River five miles downstream from its historic source in the Cotswolds. 

As a kid in Phoenix, Arizona, I was obsessed with summer because I was obsessed with the beach. After the movie North Shore came out in 1987, I decorated my bedroom walls with surfing stickers from wetsuit and board wax brands and images clipped from surfing magazines, including a quotation that said, “Summer is an attitude not a season.” 

That was my maxim. Now a 47-year-old father in the Pacific Northwest, summer is less about beaches and more about doing everything outside. Around here, summer has traditionally brought a welcome relief from our long dreary winters. People in Portland and Seattle endure the dark, wet, miserable months to camp, pick fruit and go to outdoor concerts during our brief, but glorious, warm season. Northwest summer arrives like a collective sigh. But that’s changing. Now, all this catastrophic climate news makes you want summer to end so the world can cool down.

For example, the other day Portland temperatures reached over 100 degrees. As my five-year-old daughter sat in her car seat in the back of my van waiting for air conditioning to cool her, she said, “Dad, I’m ready for autumn to start. It’s too hot.” 

Winter kind of sucks in the Northwest, but at least it doesn’t batter us with daily environmental anxiety the way summer, once a respite, now relentlessly exposes the American West’s vulnerability. Do we have enough water? Will we have rolling blackouts? Will forest fires darken the sky? Will these strange June rains ruin local farmers’ strawberries and early heat waves ruin other crops?

In summer, our civilization’s infrastructure and patterns of life — all the systems and habits we’ve relied on — are disrupted, and while we play in local water parks and host backyard barbecues, we wonder how much longer anything will work: our water, power, air conditioning and agriculture. Summer has become a bummer. 

Northwesterners tend to be outdoorsy people, the urbanite liberal voters, but many of us are now stuck between a rock and a hard place — namely, between climate reality and the desire to live the good lives we once took for granted. Many of us specifically moved to the Northwest for the scenery, ample greenery, fresh local food and beer and like-minded people who often share our social and environmental values.

Recent summers have exposed deep disconnects between our ideals and our lifestyles. Take me, for example. If I’m so concerned about climate change, why did I buy a gas-guzzling camper van to enjoy the outdoors? We take our daughter outdoors to search for wildlife and wild berries, but how can we raise a nature-loving kid when so much fossil fuel and non-recyclable packages are involved in getting her into nature?

During Portland’s recent July heat wave, people talked about that Time article “Air Conditioning Will Not Save Us,” because it was seriously hot and many Portlanders still don’t have central AC — some of whom do feel horrible about the amount of energy AC requires. We’re scared, conflicted and uncomfortable. We vote for progressive measures and candidates. We care about clean water, clean air and social justice, but we still like sleeping at a comfortable 73-degrees. We still use disposable plastic take-out containers at whichever of our city’s famous food carts use them and still eat at the joints that serve delicious, fatty, high-carbon footprint meats. A disturbing number of us still haven’t read too deeply about what climate change is doing to our lives and what that means for our children, including me. 

We know the basics: It’s bad, getting worse, melting ice, et cetera. But the specifics are too upsetting; the system-wide picture is too complicated to grasp, let alone feel within our power to address, and all that social responsibility and anxiety gets in the way of our daily living. So, we ignore certain pieces of the climate puzzle and proceed as we always have: eating out, drinking out, watching Netflix after the kids go to bed and scrolling blankly through our phones. It’s like Olaf the snowman singing in the children’s movie Frozen: “When life gets rough I like to hold onto my dreams / Of relaxing in the summer sun, just letting off steam!” 

That’s what some of us are all about: recreation, relaxation and holding on to our dreams. Where is the activism, the personal sacrifice or the big life changes to help combat climate catastrophes? Again, I’m using myself as an example, but maybe that describes you, too. It takes more than an occasional protest to make an impact, and it takes a lot of resources to support a life. Is that the way we should be utilizing the world’s resources, to stare at our phones and lounge at local craft breweries after working jobs where we try to maximize our salaries? Summer makes our contradictory lives hard to hide and maintain. Olaf is a fitting metaphor for those of us struggling to reconcile our climate contradictions and even our approaches to parenting during climate change: A snowman who craves summer’s warmth and doesn’t fully understand how his fixation, and his ignorance, will destroy him. 

* * *

Those of us who had a great childhood before climate change want to give our kids a great childhood, too. Don’t they deserve that? Can’t kids just be kids? But humanity has already waited too long to implement large-scale changes to alleviate climate change, and that includes changes to family’s daily lives. As The Los Angeles Times recently wrote: “It’s been 126 years since Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels could cause Earth’s temperature to rise … and 34 years since climate scientist James Hansen testified to Congress ‘with 99% certainty’ that global warming had already begun.”

Ignoring reality is a harmful delusion, yet so many of us live in this anxious in-between space. There’s a word for it: ‘shadowtime.’ The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a California-based conceptual-art project, created this and other new language to express and understand the world shaped by climate change. Shadowtime refers to that “feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.” No matter how sunny summer is, it’s now my shadowtime.

* * *

Youth climate activist Jamie Margolin told The New York Times that the defining sensation of her generation is “not really believing in the future.” Whether I am riding my bike, watering our garden or picking my daughter up from camp, questions race through my overactive mind about parenting. How do you raise a kid to experience a suitable mixture of blissful amusement and climate reality? How does an informed parent remain playful with their kids while carrying such dread? How do you prepare your kids for the future the way our parents did — nurturing dreams, supporting hobbies and providing opportunities for that unstructured play that’s essential to their development — when the future of the entire world seems in jeopardy? At what age is it developmentally appropriate to introduce unsettling climate information into the nurturing bubble of unstructured play they need for healthy development?

At age five, my daughter has learned the word “extinction” at school. She has experienced the death of her grandpa, her auntie and her pet dog. The movie The Lion King taught her that’s called “the circle of life.” Meanwhile, I have been teaching her to love animals and insects and feel confident in Nature. Like that book Last Stop on Market Street, we take city walks and talk to people along the way. We watch bees pollinate flowering bushes. We roll over logs to find critters underneath. I call our excursions “adventures,” because even in mundane locations, simple walks become exciting adventures with the right attitude. 

Our adventures are about learning how to see, about greeting the world with curiosity, wonder and openness. Now, she holds snakes, kisses slugs and sets house spiders free outside. She’s bold, curious and confident out there, and she appreciates nature’s bounty by picking wild berries, eating nasturtium from our garden and using aloe vera for sunburns. As she said recently, “I’m tired of all this city — these buildings and cars. Nature is more peaceful.”

So far, my approach has been to cultivate curiosity and appreciation first, then we can introduce the effects human activities have on Nature later. Because here’s the thing: The difficult news will come. Kids will get their climate news from friends and school. In fact, climate change has already brought that news into our kids’ lives. 

* * *

In September 2020, when my daughter was three, forest fires blocked the sun in Portland for 10 straight days. Like everyone else, we’d been cooped up at home during that first COVID year and we needed to be out, so we took a short vacation with friends to coastal Oregon. 

The setting was just what the doctor ordered as our little motel rooms faced the open ocean. The sound of crashing waves filled the air. For three days we splashed in the water, ate local seafood and built sandcastles with the kids. Then, on the final night, the power went out. Our lamps went dark. Our white noise machine went silent, and the kids couldn’t sleep. Everyone in our group started the next day exhausted. The motel had no generator — few stores in town did. With no hot coffee or hot breakfast, we took a group photo by the beach and said goodbye to each other and summer. None of us could have known what we were about to get into.

We returned to Portland just in time for an historic fire season stretching across Oregon and California. Fires raging on Portland’s edge caused power outages and evacuations.

On our first full day back at home, the skies darkened and smelled of ash, reducing the sun to an orange smear. Portland’s air quickly became unsafe, reaching the worst-air-quality rating on the EPA’s scale by 4:30pm on September 10, 2020. Officials advised Portlanders to stay indoors. California had always been the land of fire. Now we were, too? 

For protection, preschool kept the kids indoors. When I picked my daughter up from school, one kid told his parents, “The fires! They make the sky yucky and dark!” My daughter just showed me the school’s hummingbird feeder and explained how it worked. 

At a press conference, Oregon Governor Kate Brown addressed the situation. “We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across the state,” Brown said. “This will not be a one-time event. Unfortunately, it is the bellwether of the future.” 

News of Portland’s air quality spread. “According to the Portland Tribune newspaper,” wrote the BBC, “the pollution in the city on Thursday was ranked highest in the world, above Jakarta, Indonesia; Delhi, India; and Lahore, Pakistan.”

My kid’s preschool canceled classes. The air filters weren’t keeping the smoke out, and the owners had developed a cough. My family peered out the front door to marvel at the surreal scene — the reddish gray smoke erased the sky and cast our neighborhood’s big beautiful trees in an eerie cemetery fog, blurring their edges and tamping any summer vibrancy. The world went flat and air tasted of ash. Sometimes, you couldn’t see more than 50 feet.

On the fourth day, outside our bedroom windows looked like San Francisco fog with none of the charm. It was my wife’s and my fifth wedding anniversary, but our family spent it as just another day hunkered inside during the apocalypse, passing the time drawing, reading books, building pillow forts and watching some Disney movies. After our blissful vacation time on the beach, being stuck indoors felt even more stifling. When I harvested our garden tomatoes, I did so in a respirator with a 3M organic vapor/acid gas cartridge filter. Every previous summer, my daughter and I spent time in our backyard eating our fresh tomatoes. Shoeless on the cool grass and warmed by the sun, we would pop them in our mouths, one after another. After I washed the ash from these tomatoes, we ate them indoors like they were your standard grocery store tomato, absent the usual magic. 

That day, western Oregon had the worst air quality in the entire world. Some areas’ air rated so badly that they exceeded the scale that the Environmental Protection Agency uses to measure dangerous air quality. “[An] AQI reading of 301 or greater is considered ‘hazardous,’” reported the environmental magazine Grist, “causing the EPA to declare ‘emergency conditions’ for those who are exposed for 24 hours or more. On Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning, the area around Eugene, Oregon, clocked AQI values well into the 700 range on the real-time air-quality monitoring site PurpleAir, greatly exceeding the scale’s maximum value of 500.”

When our daughter napped, I went to the skateboard park with that respirator. It was an experiment in living with our new climate reality: Could I adjust enough to keep skating? The respirator screwed up my depth perception and when I rolled in on the park’s enormous concrete tube the first time, I nearly crashed. My eyes burned from smoke. The filter let me breathe clean air, but all those exhalations made it hard to breathe while exercising. I wiped out on the steep-sided tube and bruised my hip, but the real pain came from letting in this horrible state of affairs. Only one other skater was there. He wore no mask; he said he felt fine. I didn’t believe him. After trying to skate for a few minutes without mine, my lungs burned and my throat hurt on the drive home. 

When the smoke cleared after 10 days, the whole city seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, we could safely venture outdoors again — it was summer, after all — but the anxiety remained. This was life now. What catastrophes would next summer bring? Many locals struggled with this idea of “a regular extreme fire season.” I bought three fancy ventilators and extra home air filters to prepare for the next go-round. 

* * *

Last summer, we did not suffer forest fires. Instead, a high-pressure system caused a “heat dome” over Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Temperatures reached 108 degrees in Portland one evening, breaking the city’s 1965 record of 107 degrees. Then, the temperature reached 112 on Sunday. It was the hottest day in Portland history — until Monday’s 116-degree temperature broke that record.

Portlanders left the city for the coast and the mountains. They slept in cool basements and tried to hit local pools, before Portland Parks & Recreation closed them because it was too hot to let people swim. Heat melted power cables on Portland’s light rail system. Convenience stores sold out of ice. Restaurants closed. Our old house has no insulation and the heat permeated the walls and ceiling, filling our upstairs bedrooms. Getting stuff from the closets felt like opening the oven on Thanksgiving. We put the first of our two freestanding air conditioners in the living room, and the second in our daughter’s room, aimed at her bed. She was about to turn four. 

One day, I took her to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry to watch back-to-back nature documentaries, just to cool off. The sad irony was that we were indoors learning about the ocean and dinosaurs while the city outside was learning about climate change the hard way.

So far this summer, we’ve had more 100-degree days than last year, but none as hot. We’ve had no forest fires either. But the spring rain lasted much longer into June than usual, and the extreme heat arrived earlier, creating a dizzying pivot between soggy and arid conditions. Our kid hasn’t really noticed.

During her second day at an outdoor day camp, she and the other kids spent time catching tadpoles in a river park and looking for insects among the trees. For dinner, we ate at a restaurant named for The Grateful Dead song “Fire on the Mountain.” Our daughter sang that song while we ate, which cracked us up. The fire reference must have activated an ancient memory, because with ketchup on her face, she randomly asked us, “Remember that time in summer when there was a forest fire, and the sky was too yucky to breathe?” Then she changed the subject to sing Shakira’s song “Try Everything” from the cartoon Zootopia.

The forest fires, the smoke — two years later, she remembered.

After she went to bed, I did some web research about kids and climate change. It led me to journalist Brooke Jarvis’ incredible New York Times Magazine article “The Teenagers at the End of the World.” Focusing on the young climate activist, Jamie Margolin, the story explores youth activist culture itself, showing how hard this breed of middle and high schoolers work to get adults’ attention about climate change. These kids organize events, run activist groups, lobby, read and publish documents, and they do it instead of doing “regular” kid stuff, like playing video games and playing sports. And they do it around schoolwork — often from school, texting under their school desks, on the bus and at all hours in their childhood bedrooms. 

Their devotion is upsetting and inspiring. Here are these kids who often wanted to just be kids, but something had awoken this urgency in them, and they felt no choice but to get active. They couldn’t believe adults had let the world go to shit the way we had, and they didn’t think we had much time to fix it.

The article also showed how kids experience catastrophic events, like the forest fires my daughter remembered. Margolin told Jarvis that climate change was like Beyoncé: It was always there. “Then came Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria,” the article reads, “which hit in 2017, the same summer Seattle was choking on wildfire smoke so thick it turned the sun red, blotting out even nearby buildings and sending people to the hospital. For Margolin, the world suddenly seemed more dangerous, the future less stable, the people in charge far less capable. She began to wonder what she could do about it. By the next year, when she was 16, she and other organizers she met online were leading their first international climate protest.” 

Her young colleagues had similar origin stories. “Some particular natural disaster or event made the future seem shakier and action more urgent,” the article continued. “The October that Gottlieb was 15, he woke up at three in the morning because people fleeing from what was then the most destructive wildfire in California history were pounding on the door of his family’s house.”

Will one such event transform my daughter into an activist or paralyze her with fear? Time will tell, but she pays attention because I taught her to, and she will eventually notice whatever affects the natural world that she loves. One day, one catastrophic natural event will finally deeply reach her, and it will precipitate the ecological version of the birds-and-bees talk with us.

So far, she’s still only ready to keep cultivating her love of nature, and the idea that climate change may erase the world she knows, and end our entire species, is too much right now. It may also not be entirely accurate. Communities from Los Angeles to Paris have formalized ambitious sustainability plans that stipulate everything from transitioning the power grid to renewable energy to making buildings net carbon zero, as well as recycling wastewater to create drought-resilient supplies. 

As someone who’s paid attention to what was once called “global warming” since the late 1990s, I see progress. I see activists getting officials’ attention. I see more conservative voters taking climate change more seriously as they see the effects in their own lives. I see new policies aimed at mitigating it. I see California communities actually reducing their water usage despite population growth. 

As a species, humanity has fucked ourselves into this mess. But we, as a species, are also innovative, resourceful and resilient. I believe that if we work hard to harness technology, we can survive this, too. Sometimes I wonder if hope is another form of denial — a way that my mind continues to reckon with reality. Either way, when my daughter is ready to learn about climate change, that’s a central part of the message: We will lose many parts of our way of life, but with hard work, systemic changes and a certain attitude, we can survive this.

She will not have as many forests as my wife and I. She will not have as many wild animals. She will have a hotter climate. She will have fewer comfortable summer walks and camping spots. She may endure wars over water and resources, and may have to recycle her own water at home to reuse. Weather patterns may have disrupted agriculture so profoundly that she won’t get to enjoy the mangos and kiwis she loved as a kid, or worse, she’ll be forced to subsist exclusively on engineered foods, including the cellular meats we now eat as a convenient way to occasionally reduce our carbon footprint. Maybe, she’ll only get to eat whatever she can grow, be it tomatoes and the peppery nasturtium she and I nibble in the backyard together for fun, because that plant can grow in anything.

Much of what she will lose will be the joyful freedom I always associated with summer — and with childhood itself — but she will likely still have a world with people and animals in it. It will just look different. I might be wrong. Maybe this is my own hopeful delusion, but I can still try to let the darkness in without losing some of the light.

* * *

Nearly two years after what I call “our fire vacation,” we made our way back at the beach. This time we camped on the Oregon Coast. The site was gorgeous. Set just over a dune from the crashing waves, the days were sunny and water warm. We found live sand dollars and held tiny crabs. Our daughter even kissed a sand crab that she was carrying back to the water to release. “I kissed her,” she screamed. “For real, in real life!” 

Standing in ankle deep sea water that afternoon, I got to thinking, my mind mixing a joyous appreciation for our lives with a sense of dread about how much of this would end. Maybe this was a state of “blissonance,” which the Bureau of Linguistical Reality defines as “When an otherwise Blissful experience in nature is wedded to or disrupted by the recognition that: One is having an adverse impact on that place they are enjoying by being there; The understanding of how the place will be negatively affected in the near future by: urbanization, climate change or other disrupting factors.”

Maybe this was just more shadowtime. Whatever it was, the half that felt good felt like the familiar feeling of summers when I was a road-tripping, backcountry, 20-something and, before that, a clueless kid. As I fished for some compostable cutlery in a wooden camping crate, I found a sticker that Vivian had stuck on the bottom a couple years ago. On it, a smiling Olaf stood against a sun-orange background, surrounded by flowers, beneath the phrase “I Love Heat!”