Summertime, and the livin’ is … queasy.
Remember the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer? Back in the age of innocence (or perhaps it was ignorance), this was the time we hoisted a glass of lemonade (25 cents from the kid’s curbside stand) to a glorious respite from the rain.
These days, as soon as the sun peeks through the clouds, we’re advised to take precautionary measures. The forecast calls for a few sunny, warm days in a row and the first thing that happens is everyone freaks out and starts issuing dire bulletins:
Air quality advisories.
Heat advisories.
UV index advisories.
Forest fire advisories.
And while we’re at it, lemonade advisories. Too many grams of sugar.
If that’s not bad enough, a modest streak of sunny days is treated as a harbinger for the apocalypse, not too far down the road, when the planet withers under excessive heat and dies.
And just to make the point, an iceberg the size of Prince Edward Island melts off the edge of Antarctica.
Ominous kersplash.
I get it. Summer is hazardous to your health. And all those well-meaning doctors, scientists and doomsayers want to make sure you don’t forget it, even for a brief, carefree moment in the sun.
It’s a catch-22. The only time you can get out onto the patio and enjoy the sunshine is when it’s prudent to stay indoors, keep the windows shut and breathe only filtered air.
And that goes for the kids, too. Whatever you do, don’t let them frolic freely on the beach. Send them to SPF 50 camp instead, where they’ll learn how to avoid the 30-40 most common summertime hazards. Wearing hats with full brims. Even at night. Around the campfire, if there wasn’t a ban on campfires.
It doesn’t matter that the weather station on Redonda Drive in North Vancouver records an average 2,522 mm year of precipitation a year. That’s well over eight feet, for those of you counting via the ancient method. Severe water restrictions, emphasis on severe, in which we’re only allowed to look longingly at the garden hose and only one day week between the hours of 8 and 8:30 a.m., are nevertheless necessary.
I don’t mean to be insensitive. Of course there’s nothing funny about losing your home to a forest fire or melanoma or COPD or asthma or global warming. And it’s all real. No fake news here. But isn’t it also a matter of emphasis? Don’t we get to bask without brooding for a couple of days at least, without Al Gore reappearing like an iceberg on a collision course with the Titanic?
The latest alarm has been sounded by two studies that have concluded, using entirely different routes to get there, that the world temperature will increase by two degrees by 2100, which will lead to a litany of horrors as enumerated by CNN: rising seas, mass extinctions, super droughts, increased wildfires, intense hurricanes, diminished crops, decrease in fresh water and the ominous rapid melt of polar ice, some of it millions of years old.
Of course, those two degrees are the limit that must not be crossed according to the Paris accord, but who knows how weird it will get now that Donald Trump has blithely removed one of the world’s foremost polluters from its commitment to reduce greenhouse gases?
As I understand it, this is to make America great again … or was that burn, baby burn? Not sure.
Generally it takes May and most of June for my shoulders to unhunch after the rains of October, November, December, January, February, March and April. (I realize you’re familiar with the wet and windy months in Vancouver, but emphasis goes both ways. And speaking of both ways, climate models indicate that’s what we’re in for here on the North Side, both more wind and rain, and more drought, heat and fire).
So the shoulders just finally relax when the anxiety bred by the hazards (current and potential) of summer have them back up around my ears in no time. I’m now going to spend the August long weekend dressed appropriately in natural fibres (to ward off ultraviolet rays) looking out for those idiots who throw their cigarette butts out the window while making sure no one’s illegally watering their lawns.
That’s if they still have lawns.
Have I told you about the lawns?
Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Vancouver resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. [email protected]
