Musings on a Hot Summer Night

Given the intense heat we’ve been enduring lately, I thought it might be a perfect time to share this out-take from my never-quite-completed novel, Murder on the Whale Watch.

Humpback whale breaching on Stellwagen Bank (Photo by S. Vardatira)

It has been a hot, hot summer. Long interminable heat sliding up from Bermuda, coating Boston and all of New England in a haze of sticky wet. We have been delirious with the heat. We ache. Our joints swell in their sockets and leave us immobile, exhausted. I do not remember heat like this. You hear that wherever you go. People murmur in the streets about the state of the Earth, the drought, climate change. It is like living in purgatory, or hell. The air quality is unhealthful (at the very least). We suspect it is worse, that perhaps they’ve skewed the scale so we will feel grateful it is not worse. We believe they are lying. We feel better when they tell us that the heat and humidity combined make it feel like 105°F. That’s closer to the truth. The cactus that moved east with us from the Chihuahuan Desert is thriving. The other plants wither, curl up, and die. The cats lie sprawled across the table. Only an ear twitch leaves the impression of life. Harvard University closed yesterday.* For the first time in over 350 years, it closed because of heat. It is hot, damned hot.

We can barely remember when “hot” was simply the sizzle of love, a gesture to imply the sound of oil in a hot frying pan. The sizzle of love is almost obscene in such heat. It is reserved for night-time dramas watched by the vibrations of an oscillating fan. Even then, you consider the implications of heat between people. The beads of perspiration, the glaze of sweat under the breasts, slipping between the thighs. You imagine fights in such heat. Small, bickering, headachy fights. Anything more intense would require too much energy. Energy is in short supply. It withers in the hot sun on the pavement. It threatens to leave altogether, taking along air-conditioner and fans alike. We gaze mournfully at the TV weather forecast. We make ridiculous journeys in search of coolness, pitch our tent in the local campground despite the increasing heat, break camp, and drive home. When we can, we leave early for the beach where we submerge for hours by the water’s edge, flip off inflatable boats, dangle over air mattresses.  

In the evenings we venture out to the front stoop and wonder why the humidity hasn’t left with the last light of day. And when we’re not tossing in bed at night, turning over our pillows, and kicking off the top sheet, we dream. We dream of fall, and apple picking, and leaves turning crisp golden reds in the frosty air. We dream of cool, misty fog  . . . and whales and dolphins diving somewhere off shore, beckoning.

* This is, in fact, a bit of fiction. Harvard did not close yesterday to my knowledge. But it could happen – Harvard first closed due to heat in the summer of 1988.