The heat has come back around the way holidays do each year: predictably, on time, not-here and then, suddenly, here. The way you wake up on Christmas or on your birthday is the same way you wake up to the first triple-digit temperatures of the year. As your stream of consciousness goes from a trickle to a flow, you simply register the inevitable obvious: today is that day.
The heat is right on time, which is to say it feels too early even though it’s not, like a party guest who shows up at the exact time on the invitation while you’re still getting out of the shower. In central Texas, that time is lately just before June, sometimes a full month before the solstice and the “official” start of summer.
We’re in a “heat dome,” they say. This neologism (at least it feels new; they didn’t used to say this kind of thing) belongs in the same category as those other dreadfully-named weather phenomena: “bomb cyclones,” “superstorms,” “thundersnow,” “firenadoes,” etc. We have an entire lexicon for apocalyptic climate forces brought screaming from the speculative future to the present. Our imagination for our own destruction—played out across time at every venue from the walls of ancient pyramids, to the silver screen, to the last sheafs of cheap paper in the Christian bible—has prepared us to conceptualize these things. That we currently name them like ungodly powers from a superhero comic book I think speaks to the state of that imagination.
It’s not difficult, then, to imagine a completely transparent dome of energy, hundreds of miles wide, sealed at the edges, sitting on top of Texas.
They explain to us that the heat dome is a kind of self-fulfilling, positive feedback loop. As the heat rises and concentrates in this location, it starts to actively displace and shunt cooler weather systems coming from the north. It traps us, simmering, with no apparent function or goal. It is non-negotiable and un-puncturable. It eliminates the chance of soothing rain from now clear to September.
And so the creeks will dry up and cease to flow; the grass will dry up and turn brown; the ground will dry up and crack wide open; some of the trees will dry up and die. And right there, next to the creek, the grass, the ground, and the trees, will be us. Our brains, already pre-heated to a barely-safe 98.6 degrees F, will betray us when they start to boil over, even in the shade. People—otherwise young, healthy, disease-free—will die. I say again: a non-zero number of people are already slated to die this summer for no biological reason other than extreme heat. It might be you or me.
The non-biological reasons are myriad and usually systemic: that sick addiction to capital rages on even while homes burn down and workers collapse building new ones. Would you occupy a house differently if you knew that someone had died to build it for you?
I wonder if it would be easier on my body and my soul if the light didn’t seem to collude with the heat. Every day, like the heat, the light shows up earlier and overstays its welcome. These days we’re roused by 6:45am; in a month it’ll be 6:15am or so. Of course the light and the heat come from the same source; the conspiracy, if there is one, is galactic in scale and has only just begun to be described by the entire history of human mathematics.
In the meantime, while we wait for the scientists and physicists and mathematicians to finish tidying up those equations and deliver unto us a Theory of Everything, we’ll scramble around like the truly dumb animals we are. We’ll injure ourselves slugging down too much water, or not enough. We’ll blast the air conditioning in our cars and our houses, and when those break down we’ll frantically throw money at other sweating people to fix them for us instead of learning how to do it ourselves or adapting in other ways. We’ll stand up in state legislatures and courtrooms in tailored suits, long sleeves and long pants (“it’s always freezing in here”), and argue about whether the poorer people, the darker people, the people who don’t speak the language in which we’re arguing, have the right to be able to take a break after 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or one hour in the sun. As it usually goes from year to year, one of them will have to die in order to get these arguments started, and some of them will die waiting for us to come up with an answer. The state (this state, at least), will argue back that it’s not their problem to solve.
In my world, we—my partner and I—will hold our breaths for the next four months. Part of our bespoke family unit lives outside full time: the hens. We’ll stock the freezer with chunks of watermelon, pull out extra watering tubs, install electric fans that run 24/7, and we’ll wait.
The differences between a person having a heat stroke and a chicken having a heat stroke are minimal. The blitz of heat to the organs prompts a kind of stumbling trance; already unintelligible, the chicken becomes mute and hangs its head low, slowly swaying from side to side. Chickens are already oddly fragile creatures that can die in an instant for any number of reasons, and it seems to me that the window for discovering and recovering a chicken in heat stroke is incredibly narrow. An hour at most, but perhaps just minutes. Human beings succumb with the same rapidity.
Sometimes you can run a stroking bird indoors, provide it with cool darkness and some water, and it will regain its strength after a day or so. Sometimes (and with a heavy sigh that conveys both exasperation and relief), we find one that has already died. But if you have to kill a chicken, here is what you do: you hold the bird under your arm like you’re running a football down a field. The bird fits just as well under your armpit, sandwiched between your elbow and your ribs. With your other hand, you grab the chicken at the base of the neck and pull its head forward, away from its body. Chickens have surprisingly long necks, usually obscured by feathers, that they keep tucked into their body in a kind of S-shape like other long-necked birds (e.g. herons, egrets, etc.). With the neck fully extended, you bring your arm toward your chest, pulling the head back and up just like pulling a lever, and you keep pulling backward until you feel a pop where the neck meets the body.
Dislocating a chicken’s neck like this is the fastest and most humane way to kill them, or so I read. They will kick and thrash, they will flap their wings—this is all involuntary, spasmodic, the contractions of dumb muscle suddenly separated from its governor, or so I read. The chicken ceases to feel anything and dies instantaneously at the moment of dislocation, or so I read.
Two summers ago I took Wanda under the oak tree out back and did just this. She had been convalescing inside for three days and nights after having a heat stroke, and each morning she seemed worse off until it was clear that she was not coming back. The light woke me up early on the fourth day, and in the dim bathroom where she was laying on a towel in the tub I could see that she had not died overnight, which I had selfishly hoped for.
At the time there were fourteen birds in the flock. Some of them were friendly, some not. Some of them didn’t have names, though most did. “Why this one?” I wept. I had raised her from a day old; I had sat next to her brooder for weeks and picked the banjo in a way that I thought sounded like a chicken; when she got older and started laying eggs, I wrote her a proper song. Like most of us, she was average among her peers—not the first in line, but far from the end. “I see you,” I had tried to let her know.
Everything I had read turned out to be true, though I was not prepared for the stream of yogurt, egg, and mashed blueberries that I had tried to fortify her with over the previous three days to come pouring back out of her now dangling beak. In the pre-dawn, I killed and buried my bird.
We are now in the pre-dawn of our Texas summer. What pain awaits us this year? After last year my partner had said, “not again, not another summer,” and yet here we still are. And why? Money (or the lack of it)? High interest rates on new mortgages? No jobs (or no motivation to find them)? Or is it most likely that, being “human, all-too-human,” we find it easier to persist than to change course.
What Am I Watching?
The last film of the legendary Bogart/Bacall on-screen partnership (their own marriage would persist another 9 years until his death in 1957) is somewhat of a chamber piece—most of the action in Key Largo is confined to the inside of a nearly empty hotel while a hurricane rages outside, and there are only a handful of characters.
After returning from WWII, Bogart’s Frank McCloud is headed south to pursue… what, he doesn’t quite know. But he needs a change. Along the way, he stops into a hotel in Key Largo to visit the father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Bacall) of an Army comrade killed in Italy. The hotel is closing down for the summer off-season but is currently occupied by a group of obvious criminals posing as vacationing fishermen while they hide out and wait for an off-shore rendezvous to move some counterfeit currency. Their leader, Johnny Rocco, is played by Edward G. Robinson in one of his slimiest, most cynical, most nihilistic roles. When a hurricane sweeps in and traps everyone in the hotel, the criminals are quickly outed and take the others hostage.
Directed by a brightly shining John Huston early in his career (who had already struck genius from his very first film, The Maltese Falcon (not to mention The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)), all of the actors deliver stellar performances but especially Claire Trevor, who ended up receiving an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. A hopeless drunk and former nightclub singer, she’s deep in delirium tremens when Robinson’s Rocco demands that she sing a song if she wants anything more to drink. Her wavering a capella delivery slowly crumbles as she faces the camera directly and sings, only to be viciously denied her reward by Rocco. I absolutely love musical performances in non-musical films, and this one stands the test of time in how powerfully moving and effective it is at drawing a circle not just around Trevor’s pitiable floozy, but also around multiple other characters in the same scene who react and respond in their own ways.
The film is usually grouped in the noir canon, though it ends on a decidedly more optimistic note than a typical noir—whether it’s summer heat or a summer hurricane, nothing really lasts forever.