Here in northern Virginia, weeks of swelter have been replaced by cool nights, warm sun and low-humidity air.
I feel like I’m in Colorado again, where you dress in layers that can be peeled off or piled on as the day’s warmth waxes and wanes.
It’s an interesting way to live, temperature differences of 30 degrees or more in a single day. Does one get used to it over time, or does one day feel like many?
Back home now, remembering our adventures, one of which was a little too close for comfort.
It was Friday evening and we had just returned from a day of hiking and sightseeing in Canyonlands when our cell phones began to blare with warning messages of flash floods. Scary, yes, but hardly cause for concern, we thought, tucked away in our motel on Main Street in Moab.
What hubris! We had only gone across the street to dinner, but decided to browse in a bookstore on the way home. Not just any bookstore, by the way. Back of Beyond was started by friends of the writer Edward Abby shortly after his death in 1989. Its selection of environmental and place titles was phenomenal, and I was absorbed, as I usually am in the presence of great books.
In retrospect, we should have been alarmed by the sandbags we stepped over to enter the store; we assumed they were just a precaution. But no more than 15 minutes after I snapped the rainbow photo above, I looked out the bookstore window to find that Main Street had vanished — with a river of brown water flowing in its place.
So much precipitation fell so quickly that creeks overflowed their banks and water poured off the mountains that surround the town. We couldn’t exit the front door of the store, but a helpful clerk let us out the back, where we walked several feet before finding that the side street we’d hoped to cross was just as flooded as Main Street.
We searched for other routes back to our hotel, which we could see but couldn’t figure out how to reach. By then it was pouring again, and we had lightning to worry about as well as the swirling stream. It wouldn’t be pleasant to wade across, but we had no other choice.
We took a deep breath and plunged into the water, which came halfway up to my knees. It was murky and brown, cold and deep. The current was brisk. Had the water been a bit higher the cars on the road would have been floating. As it was, I later heard there were people kayaking in downtown Moab.
By the time we reached the hotel our shoes and pants were soaked. But we were overjoyed to be back on dry ground, and I have a new respect for flash floods.
There are flood warnings and tornado warnings here today, as what’s left of Hurricane Debby pummels us from offshore. I slipped out during a lull, which I thought at first might be the eye of the storm, but which was more likely a gap between bands of rain and wind.
I left sunglasses at home but almost wished I’d worn them as the clouds parted from time to time. For the most part, though, it was a cloudy walk and a wild one. Winds whipping. Sticks crunching beneath my feet. A sense of urgency: get home before the skies open.
I made it, and now I wait for the predicted deluge. We certainly need it. I can almost hear the trees and plants lapping it up.
I had another post in mind for today but I’ll put it aside for this one. Because into this cauldron of heat and humidity has fallen what I thought I wouldn’t see again for weeks: a rainy day.
It’s early yet, so it may not last. And a quick peek at the weather page tells me that we may not get as drenched as our neighbors to the east. But it’s a start.
Waking up to wet pavement and gray skies is usually not a recipe for joy. But given our drought, it is today.
(Rain falls in Manhattan, July 2021)
It’s been a while since I’ve seen running water, besides what I run through our taps. The streams in my neighborhood, the smallest tributaries of Little Difficult Run, have been dry for weeks.
Yesterday I walked a section of the Cross County Trail that has a notoriously (to me!) difficult stone crossing. It should be dry enough to skip over, I thought, and decided to try it.
Turns out, that shady section of the trail is one of the few places where I’ve seen running water lately, where I’ve heard the music of liquid sluicing over stones.
I paused for a moment and took in the scene, the glare of sunlight on stream water, the tracery of shadows. I realized what I’ve been missing these last hot, dusty weeks.
I’ve been taking a look at the categories in my blog, trying to whittle down a list that’s 160 strong, which is about, oh, 150 categories too many.
Doing this is an exercise not just in taxonomy but identity. That more posts are tagged “walking” than anything else is to be expected — but why so many posts tagged weather?
When I first realized this, I took myself to task: “Weather, Anne? Really? Can’t you do better than that?” But then I thought about it some more.
For a blog that’s about place, about noticing, what could be more elemental than the elements?
Whether it’s the snow that made this blog possible or the heat that’s even now telling me to finish my post and start walking immediately, before the pavement is truly sizzling, weather is not a tepid topic. It’s a living, breathing force we reckon with daily.
Yesterday amidst the cooking and prepping for the evening’s festivities, the clouds were building, the air becoming even stickier, though that seemed impossible.
There have been so many times this summer when this had happened, but to no avail. Yesterday afternoon was different, though.
By evening an inch and a half of rain had fallen, soaking the ground, tamping down dust, freshening up the ferns, giving green a chance.
It needs it.
(A tracery of shadows on a past lawn.)
Something shifted overnight. It won’t last long, so I’d better write fast. A cool breeze is blowing in from the west, bending the bamboo that fringes the deck, and thin clouds are scuttling through a blue sky.
There is movement and gladness in the air, and the lazy trills of birdsong.
Colors look brighter, and there are plenty of them, especially in the back garden.
I’d like to sit here and keep describing it all, but I’d better walk now, before it goes away.
(Two young walkers enjoying a cool breeze a few weeks ago. Photo: CCC)
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a heat wave in the Eastern United States, with temperatures of 100 degrees, which will feel warmer with the humidity.
The chances are you have heard, though, because the weather folks have been beating the drum about this since Monday. Through lovely cool mornings and passable afternoons, we’re heard about heat domes, hydration and cooling centers.
It’s not just a different kind of weather these days; it’s a different kind of weather report.
(One of the hotter places I’ve visited recently: the Alcazar in Seville, Spain.)
The term sounds vaguely familiar, like something I learned long ago, and a quick search tells me that it was a system of equal trade and investment in China in the first half of the 20th century.
I chose the title with another thought in mind: the way it feels to leave the front door open on a perfect June afternoon. An open door policy made possible by a screen instead of glass, and perhaps only good for another day or two.
So far, we’ve been able to get by without air conditioning in the house: opening and closing windows at strategic moments, gathering in the morning coolness like an arm full of crisp line-dried laundry.
They’re calling for much higher temps by week’s end, so we may have to give in and close up the house. But it’s been lovely to leave doors and windows open, to breathe in and out with the day.
