Summer

It's a hot summer. Today the high was not 106, as was feared, but 102, which is still very hot.

9 PM:
Murphys, 81.6 
Burbank, sadly, is hotter, at 84 
San Francisco 54.4
Baltimore 74.5
Boston 77.9
Center Conway NH 79.8
San Rafael CA 66.6

These are all cities where I've lived. I remember Baltimore on summer nights when it was 99 degrees and humidity was 99%. This was before air conditioning and sleeping seemed impossible. In one house that we lived in, my sister and I would go to sleep in our parents' bed, and our father would carry us upstairs late at night, when the temperature of the second floor had lowered a bit.

Luckily, most of the summer was spent in Center Conway, New Hampshire. It was always a challenge to pack sweaters and coats for the long, long drive, but we would arrive and it would be cool.

You know what Mark Twain said about summer in San Francisco? It was the coldest winter he'd ever spent. Slight exaggeration, but when inland heats, it pulls the ocean fog and blessed cool air in from the Pacific. Even San Rafael, in Marin County just to the north of San Francisco, that phenomenon held true; although the days were hotter, nights were always cool.

My last two summers in Boston I spent on Cape Cod, as a counselor at a camp run by Boston Children's Services. At least that's the name that I remember of the agency. I can't remember the name of the camp, although it'll probably come to me in the middle of this hot summer night. I do recall it was on Bloody Pond, which name they kept trying to change, to no avail. What inner city kid wouldn't want to be at a camp on Bloody Pond with the ghosts of the Indians killed there. (Forgive the archaic ethnic name - it's part of the legend.) Even Wikipedia doesn't find my Bloody Pond, so perhaps the grownups finally did effect a newer and less exciting name. 

During my first summer there, in 1966, I kept my apartment in the North End of Boston and would manage a few days at home from time to time. I lived in a vaguely restored tenement, with a bathroom in the hall, to be shared with the other tenant on the floor. My apartment was a three-room railroad flat along one side of the air well that served to provide fresh, but unmoving and hot air to the apartments that lined it. 

Which reminds me of humidity. The east coast is full of it, I remember, and I hear it still is today. So the temperature figures above are not a true reflection of how it feels. We don't have any humidity here in the foothills of the Sierras. I'm not sure there is humidity in California, unless you count fog. It never rains in the summer at this elevation, although summer thunderstorms are not uncommon in the high country. I remember many camping trips in the pouring rain. But we never went home because of the rain.

The danger of thunderstorms in most of the state is the danger of a lightning strike in the hot, dry, dusty grassland or wooded mountains. 

Tonight I have the air conditioning on, two ceiling fans and a table fan in the bedroom. I confess that I will leave the AC on all night - it'll go off when the temperature gets down to 77. I'll be asleep then.