a prelude for july

As I write this, we're recovering from a heatwave that is worse than anything the Pacific Northwest has ever seen on record, with all-time record high temperatures being posted across the entire bioregion, often for several consecutive days, or more. It would have been bad for any time of year, but this was still June, when the temperatures are still usually fairly manageable. It was staggeringly hot, a kind of heat much of the region is woefully unprepared for. Summer, it seems, wants to make its presence felt this year. The temperatures are still well above normal for the time of year, and will be for some time yet; it's cool enough that the heat wave feels "over" but warm enough that it could still be causing problems, drying up plants that could become fuel for wildfires, interfering with crops as they grow . . . the initial heat was catastrophic enough, but the subtle lingering warmth could cause still more damage.

And this is the Fourth of July weekend, the first one "after the pandemic", the weekend after all this heat, when so many fireworks will be set off, when the conditions are ripe for fire . . . usually the worst of wildfire season for Seattle is later in the summer, but already things are pretty bad. That means that we have more time when conditions are optimal for wildfires, which would be bad even if Americans weren't so deeply and reliably foolish.

Also as I write this, King County has lifted its mask mandate, because our vaccination numbers hit a particular arbitrary total, ignoring the WHO's recommendation to maintain mask requirements and the worrying increase of the so-called delta variant of the virus, which appears to spread much more quickly. America has decided that we have done enough to declare the pandemic over, so we're acting as if it is. So now we're relying on the feverish hope that the vaccines are good enough that they can prevent variants from taking root and mutating to the point that we need new vaccines.

It is well and truly summer, then: brutal, unrelenting, interminable, inexorable. It's hard to feel hopeful when the heat is so bad that all you can do is lie on the floor with some wet towels and hope that it cools down enough at night that you can get a few hours of sleep. It's hard to feel like the pandemic is over when the health organizations that aren't compromised by capitalist interests are begging us to keep restrictions in place, warning that nowhere is safe until everywhere is safe.

I hope my fears are unfounded, that these filters I've been collecting over the past few fire seasons will go unused, that the numbers will actually continue their slow decline. But summer, I've found, is seldom merciful.