*Gasp* Is It Hell, or Just Summer? Finding Someplace Cool, Green, & Shady 250 Years Later

Squirrel splooting - Image courtesy of Unsplash photographer Asif Ali

Summer got you overheated? Feeling lethargic unless you're in the air conditioning? Can't breathe? Feel like you're melting?

If you're feeling wilted, you're not alone. Maybe it's time for a natural refresh, someplace cool. Mornings and evenings are primo. Grab some fresh fruit, iced tea or ice cream, "set a spell" with a great read, find a shady swimming hole, chillax, and melt gracefully into summer.

Just be sure to check the heat index and air quality first.

Image courtesy of Unsplash photographer Ben Kim

Soaring temps with high humidity, urban heat islands, drifting wildfire smoke and toxic air quality have combined for a summer of environmental oppression in the Midwest. People with respiratory and cardiovascular ailments are staying inside in air conditioned quarters, praying the air compressor will last just one more season, or that the electrical storm won't wipe out the grid. Taking care of our vulnerable family members and neighbors if the a.c. fails is an ethical imperative. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are life-threatening, and not to be diminished or ignored.

Strangely, I find solace in our nation's forebears who struggled with oppression in another context 250 years ago when it was hot as hell, and their blood was boiling. Basic rights, unalienable rights were at issue. It would take us years - and a grueling Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, equality for women, and all the aftermath - to attempt to secure rights for humans. We're still working on that paradigm shift. What about the Rights of Nature?

To put our current summer of environmental assault on public lands in perspective, I've been reading David McCullough's dramatic portrayal of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and company and their nation-making cocoon at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, summer of 1776. It was a savage thirst for "Independency," when high heat and an elevated fever of injustice, plus the very real risk of total annihilation, made their interminable hothouse miserable.

"I dread the melting heats of a Philadelphia summer, and know not how my frail Constitution will endure it." (John to Abigail Adams, May 27, 1776) A year later Adams described the air of the city "like the fierce breath of an hot oven. Every Body has been running to the Pumps all day long." (August 13, 1777) Jefferson was known for keeping a detailed record of the weather with a thermometer he had purchased for 3 pounds, 15 shillings. He noted an unseasonably cool 76 degrees in the early afternoon of July 4, 1776. It was an anomaly. The rest of the summer was blistering.

Fears of the high costs of waging war, and of the potential for disastrous outcomes for the nascent nation burned within Adams.

"We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant that they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise, not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls."

I wonder how Adams would assess us a quarter of a millennium later. Their summer of 1776 was one for the books. Burning fears about the future was their crucible for soulful reflection, as it is for us today.

Image courtesy of Unsplash photographer Liana S.

Unlike our current summer of 2026, the Founders didn't have urban heat islands caused by natural land being replaced with impervious, dark surfaces that absorb and trap solar radiation, like our roadways, parking lots, and low-albedo building materials. Add to this our restricted wind flow from industrial cluster and skyscraper-scale architecture, along with rampant pollution. No wonder we're overheated and suffocating! Summer's oppressive heat islands are also exacerbated by loss of cooling vegetation. In other words, trees and gardens are at a premium, and we need them desperately. They're necessary for evapotranspiration. But trees and gardens (cooling vegetation regions) don't surround us anymore in our cityscapes. We have to go find them.

And we have new tyrants at home and abroad who make our blood boil, who obtain their influence by noise, meanness, ignorance, and contracted hearts, as Adams feared. No wonder our interior temp is rising; it reflects our global fever.

Yikes.

Image courtesy of Unsplash photographer Michaela St

If you grew up in the Midwest as I did in St. Louis, we longed for relief from the heat, or "temporary respite from hell," as my Father jested. One window fan in the kitchen said it all. Our Summer desire for cool places naturally reflected what Nature offered us in the growing season each year, what we lovingly call the "Heat Index." A Heat Index is what it feels like when we're outside, immersed in respiratory bathwater, the ambient air temperature plus the relative humidity. Stifling. My dearly departed once reported back home to family in Milwaukee, "A person can't live here." He had arrived on a train in St. Louis after midnight in August of '65. It was 87 degrees. No a.c. Hot town, summer in the city.

Image courtesy of Unsplash photographer Dwayne Pounds

Cue Lovin' Spoonful:

"Summer in the City" (1966)

Hot town, summer in the city

Back of my neck gettin' dirty and gritty

Been down, isn't it a pity?

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people lookin' half dead

Walkin' on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

But at night, it's a different world...

Accordingly, I grew up thirsty for trees, and for cool, shady spaces in the soupy desolation that was summer. It was here that my desire, nay, my NEED and constant thirst for trees was born. It was my Soulscape, something like this:

Image courtesy of Laura Weber

"Cool and Green and Shady" (John Denver, 1974)

Saturdays, holidays, easy afternoon

Lazy days, summer days, nothin' much to do

Rainy days are better days for hanging out inside

Rainy days and city ways make me want to hide

Someplace cool and green and shady

Find yourself a piece of grassy ground

Lay down, close your eyes

Find yourself, maybe lose yourself

While your free spirit flies...

Someplace cool and green and shady...

What will we do this summer to keep cool? How will we help others stay cool? Summer is an opportunity to luxuriate, pay attention, to look around and listen to what is happening in our bioregion and our globe. What do we find?

*Gasp*

Get a drink, Buddy! - Image courtesy of Laura Weber

It's not just humanity that is suffering from the scourge of global warming, and despots who turn up the furnace. We see heat islands affecting ALL our kin, the wider "We" of creation. We see squirrels "splooting" to keep cool, avian kin and pollinators who desperately need cool water for hydration, seasonal crops dying of drought, and increased risk of wildfires. Wars raging. Oppression. Suffocating in a hell of our own making. It will take all of us to make this better. Sense. Greatness. Learning. Large souls.

Someplace cool and green and shady.