It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having; or, Rhapsody on a theme by John Ashbery

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So (I says casually), did you see the photo on the front page of the New York Times on Friday? Snow in Jerusalem. Crazy, right?

 

 

And how about that heatwave in Australia? Pretty awful.

 

 

Not to mention the soaking rains they’ve been having in the UK.

 

 

And did I mention that it’s gonna be close to sixty degrees here in Providence over the next few days? In mid-January. Seriously, it feels like late March / early April outside.

 

 

You know where I’m going with this.

 

 

We’ve done it to ourselves. We didn’t mean to do it, but we did it. We have steadily warmed our climate, and now abnormal weather is the new normal: storms, droughts, temperature extremes. 2012 was the warmest year on record in the United States, by the way.

 

 

So what can we do about it?

 

 

Little enough. The damage is already done. The carbon dioxide is already out there, and the ozone is already torn up.

 

 

Good night and good luck, human race.

 

 

(But let’s end with something nice. I started with a John Ashbery quote, so let’s have the whole poem, and think – or hope – that humanity might not die out completely, or might at least leave behind something beautiful.)

 

 

(Something like this:)

 

 

 

 

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know. 

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New England winter

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Walking through the parking lot of my office a while ago, I noticed that the management company has put up those tall orange sticks again, in the landscaping and along the edges of the sidewalks.

 

 

If you live in a temperate climate, you won’t know what those are for. If you live in a place where snow falls heavily, you’ll know that they’re meant for snowplow season.

 

 

The sticks are about three or four feet high, so that even if we get a whopper of a snowstorm, the sticks will still be visible above the snow, and the plows can avoid the curbs and the shrubs.

 

 

It took me well over twenty years to figure out what the orange sticks were for. The property managers put them in place well before the snow falls, usually, so you don’t really make the connection between stick and snow.

 

 

I grew up in a very temperate place: western Washington state. Winters there are dark and rainy and relatively warm, and snow falls only once in a while. We didn’t need orange sticks in our parking lots.

 

 

Does it bear repeating that the New England winters are getting less and less snowy, and more and more like those Northwest winters? Here we are in mid-December, when the weather in Rhode Island should be freezing every day, and it was – mm – damp and dark and rainy today. Just like those old rain-foresty temperate winters in western Washington.

 

 

Also, there are still those damned cherry trees that bloomed a few weeks ago. It’s been happening with regularity over the past few years: the blooming of those insane (or deluded) trees in mid-winter.

 

 

The world is changing, kids, Mayapocalypse or no Mayapocalypse.

 

 

There are those who assure us that, even if climate change is happening, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a Northwest Passage! Saskatchewan and the Dakotas will be like Paradise!

 

 

And who needs Florida, or South Carolina, or the Maldive Islands, or cares if they’re swamped completely?

 

 

And who cares if the equatorial regions become uninhabitable? No one important lives there, right?

 

 

As I’ve said before: I have maybe twenty or thirty years left on earth, if I’m very lucky. I never dreamed I’d say something like this, but: I hope I don’t live to see the worst of it.

 

 

I’ve seen cherry trees blooming in New England in December.

 

 

That’s bad enough for me.

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A bumper crop of weeds

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Such a crop of weeds we’ve had this year!

 

 

There’s a yard down on Cooke Street, a few blocks from our house, with weeds like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of them are eight feet tall. There’s dwarf dandelion (it seems silly to call it “dwarf” when it’s that tall, although “dwarf” refers to the flowers, not the plant), and some pokeweed, and other things I don’t know the names of. I actually own a copy of the “Golden Guide to Weeds,” and I still cannot figure out what some of them are. They are like props in a horror movie, or background scenery in an episode of “Lost in Space.” They tower over me. (Fine. They’ll be dead in a few months, and I’ll (probably) still be here. So let them tower.)

 

 

I love weeds. I love the way they sprawl and occupy the space they’re given. I know they can be parasites, but they’re often lovely. (My father, a farmer at heart, hated weeds, and hated it when he saw me playing with things like quackgrass and cheat. I had no idea that I was doing anything wrong.) I love the resilience of weeds, and their vigor. Many of them are annuals: they grow from seed in a single season, and die. Imagine that! All that growth in a single year!

 

 

And they are common, and friendly, and green. They mean no harm. (Most of them, anyway.)

 

 

And why do you suppose we’re getting such a nice crop of them this year?

 

 

We’re getting warmer hereabouts; we’re getting a climate that’s more like the mid-Atlantic states. Climate change, you know. And the landscape, and the greenery, are responding with gladness

 

 

Lovely weather, if you’re a weed.

 

 

(Not sure if it’s so good for us people, though.)

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The truffle crisis

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As you may or may not know, there is a truffle crisis in Europe.

 

 

The European black truffle, Tuber melanosporum, is cherished by gastronomes everywhere. It has an indescribable flavor and aroma. It is rare and cannot be cultivated easily. It is hunted by dogs and pigs, which dig them up, but which are not allowed to eat them. (Apollonia tells me that the pigs are given acorns as a reward. Do you call that justice?) It grows symbiotically with the roots of certain trees, usually the oak.

 

 

(There are also white truffles (Tuber magnatum), and pecan truffles, and Oregon truffles. Go read about them on Wikipedia.)

 

 

The European truffle crop has been much smaller lately, partly due to climate change. Given how much demand there is for them, this is a problem.

 

 

There are also Chinese truffles (Tuber himalayensis / Tuber indicus). They grow much more easily than their European cousins. They have little or no flavor. They are being brought to Europe, and mixed in with European truffles, the way cocaine dealers mix flour or sugar in with their product.

 

 

Also: the spores of the Chinese truffle are beginning to escape into the local environment, and Chinese truffles are now growing in Europe. It is feared that, like kudzu, the Chinese truffle will crowd out the aristrocratic European varieties.

 

 

(I have never knowingly tasted a truffle. I think I’ve had things with truffles in them, but I have no clear recollection. Apollonia tells me that her Italian relatives have whole rooms full of them, and eat them like apples, but I am never sure how much faith to put in her little stories.)

 

 

I have given before the recipe for salade Rossini.  I have never made it. Perhaps I never will. But I like reading (and thinking about) the recipe:

 

 

·       Potatoes cooked in chicken stock;

·       Mussels (a third less than the potatoes);

·       “As many truffles as the budget will allow, sliced and cooked in champagne”;

·       A nice fruity vinegar and olive oil and salt and pepper and some tarragon over all. 

 

 

It sounds delicious.

 

 

Children: don’t allow the Chinese truffle to ruin our imaginary salade Rossini. Insist on the black European truffle.

 

 

Western culture depends upon it.

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Summer heat

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It has been very hot in Providence this summer.  This week was pretty awful: mid-90s, high humidity. The air was like the water in a dirty aquarium: warm, and thick, and most likely toxic. Yesterday morning, walking to work, I was sweating like a Teamster. I was carrying a blue-covered library book, and when I got to work I found that it had left blue dye all over my lovely rose-pink shirt. At one point downtown I realized that the temperature inside my body was almost the same as the temperature outside my body; I had the creepy feeling that I didn’t know where my body left off and the outside world began.


I know, however, that we have it easy compared to other parts of the country. We haven’t had any really horrible storms (although lightning did strike our building a while back). We are not spontaneously combusting, like Colorado. We are not getting flash floods, like Arizona.


Still, it’s pretty icky and nasty here.


I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, green and mild, where 80 degrees was considered steamy. (On my first trip to the Northwest with Partner in 2001, we were in Seattle during a (mild) heatwave – mid-80s! – and everyone was apologizing to us for the heat.) Then I came here, to Southern New England, where the winters are bitter and the summers are ferocious, and I suffer every day. (Except during the long beautiful autumn and the brief gorgeous spring.)


I take it easy on these hot days. I drink lots of water and move slowly. (Last summer, I nearly dehydrated myself on a hot summer day, and came close to collapsing. I will not do that again.) On Monday, one of my student employees, an athlete in training, overdid it during an afternoon workout; he spent the evening retching and the next day recuperating. (I told him to hydrate and not overexert himself. These kids don’t listen to me. I lectured him on this yesterday, and he heard me out very meekly, but I doubt that he’s learned his lesson.)


Global warming? Oh, wait, we call it “climate change” now. Nah. Couldn’t be.


As I said to Apollonia the other day: this is good practice for Hell, when we finally get there.


From the Book of Jonah, Chapter Four (King James Version, naturally):

⁵ So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. 

⁶ And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. 
⁷ But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. 
⁸ And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. 


Speaking for myself: I would be exceeding glad of a gourd right about now.

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Skunk cabbage

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I wrote a blog not long ago about how warm the winter and early spring have been here in southern New England, and how all the plants are confused and blooming out of season. 

 

 

It was an apocalyptic screed, and I wanted to write something more mellow to counter it.

 

 

Early flowers are not entirely a bad thing.  They are lovely. Right now, in early spring, the magnolias are blooming on the Brown campus.  The azaleas are blooming near my office building!  I’ve seen dandelions in bloom!  And there’s something in the grass outside our apartment that looks almost like carpet bugle, with tiny purple blossoms, but much smaller.

 

 

All this in early spring.

 

 

(Ahem.  Global warming / climate change / apocalypse. Ahem.)

 

 

The other day we were driving through rural Connecticut (to go to Foxwoods – why else would we be driving through rural Connecticut?), and I was watching the drab early-spring scenery rush by.  And I saw, in a low unruly-looking place among trees, skunk cabbage coming up!

 

 

It took me back.  I don’t know if East Coast skunk cabbage is the same as the West Coast variety I used to see in Washington state, but it looks exactly the same.  Those big shiny green leaves!  Those big juicy yellow flowers that smell like rotting meat!

 

 

That, my friends, is the nasty sulfurous aroma of rebirth.

 

 

Welcome, Connecticut skunk cabbage.  We’re very glad to see you. 

 

 

You're the real herald of spring.

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All the pretty little flowers!

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The weather this week has been unbelievably warm for Rhode Island in March.  Monday, the last day of winter, was mid-70s and balmy; I walked to the downtown library at lunchtime and had to take off my Mister Rogers sweater when I got back to the office.

 

 

(I say not a word about climate change.  Not a word. I said to Partner the other evening: It’s done.  There’s nothing that can be done at this point, nothing more to be said.  The climate’s changing.  We may as well use up all the fossil fuels as fast as we can, because it won’t make a bit of difference. Oh kids. I hope we’ve got a couple of decades left before we all go phffft.)

 

 

The vegetation hereabouts – I can’t even tell you.  It’s in total confusion.  I think the snowdrops committed suicide, I never saw them bloom.  The big witch-hazel tree on the corner of East Manning and Ives is still squeezing out red/yellow blossoms, even though it usually blooms in the January snow.  The crocus (croci?) are on fast-forward: the leaves came up, then the buds swelled and bloomed in a day or two, and now they’re drooping in the heat.  Daffodils realized that it must be spring and bloomed almost literally overnight.  Tulips are leaping up a month early.  Vinca is already blooming (doesn’t it usually wait until May?).  The magnolias on the Brown campus are blooming here and there.  Forsythia is coming out.  The violets in the lawn outside aren’t blooming yet, but the leaves are turning peculiar colors.

 

 

(But most of the trees aren’t budding yet.  It’s a strange combination: sunny warm balmy weather, flowers in the grass, and no leaves on the trees.)

 

 

(And I see on Facebook from my friends in the Northwest that it’s snowing.  In mid-March!  In the warm sweet welcoming Northwest!)

 

 

Everyone’s predicting a hot humid summer.  I don’t know.  I’m picturing one of those stormy summers, with a thunderstorm every evening and lots of hurricanes gestating in the Caribbean.

 

 

But who knows?

 

 

Enjoy the pretty flowers, kids.  Enjoy the pretty flowers.

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Northwest winter

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You are sick of listening to me moan and groan about the unseasonal weather, and climate change, and all such hippie tree-hugger liberal talk, I know.  So I will zip my lip and say no more.

 

 

(Rhode Island has hardly had any snow this winter so far, by the way.  Our winter has been positively balmy.  I walked downtown with no coat - just a sweater - the other day.  The grass is still pretty springy and fresh in most places around Providence, and I’ve seen things blooming.  In January.)

 

 

(Oops.  Zip the lip.  Sorry.)

 

 

This winter reminds me of the typical Northwest winter: cool, cloudy, dark, often foggy and rainy.  It’s the kind of winter that engenders “cabin fever”: you stay inside with your loved ones, waiting for spring, until you just can’t stand them any longer, and then you get out the shotgun.

 

 

Dark foggy weather doesn’t frighten me.  I grew up in the Northwest.  It’s nothin’.  By April, we’ll be tearing off our winter underwear and dancing among the daffodils.  For now –

 

 

Well, but still.  You have to make it through the darkness.

 

 

A few years ago, Partner and I were driving through rural Oregon.  It was midsummer, and the hills were covered with beautiful firs and pines, and the sky was wonderfully blue.  “I could live here,” Partner said.

 

 

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m picturing this in mid-December.  You wouldn’t even be able to see those hills, the fog would be so thick.  It’d get light around ten in the morning, and dark again by four in the afternoon.  From November through mid-February.”

 

 

Partner regarded me mildly.  He has only ever seen the Northwest in summertime, and I think he has only ever seen it rain there once, one day in Portland.  He doesn’t really believe me.

 

 

But oh yes it’s true.

 

 

(Oh, did I mention that it’s snowing in Egypt this winter?  Yeah.  Oh, and they’re having a huge and extremely unseasonal windstorm – with hundred-mile-an-hour winds – on the central Oregon coast.)

 

 

(Huh!)

 

 

(Enjoy the future, kids.  It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.)

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The United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change, Durban, South Africa, 2011

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The Durban climate conference began yesterday.  According to the Financial Times, the conference is given “low expectations of success.”

 

 

No surprise here.

 

 

(Cherry trees are blooming again, down by Fox Point here in Providence (latitude forty-one degrees).   They were blooming downtown two months ago, if you recall.)

 

 

(So climate change has at least driven the trees crazy.)

 

 

(That’s something, at least.)

 

 

The President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, wrote an editorial in the FT last weekend to say that his country (a small group of very low-lying islands, none of them more than a few meters above sea level) was striving to become carbon-neutral and environmentally responsible, and asking other countries to do the same.

 

 

Then again: George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, was recently quoted as saying that he would not “kill Britain to save the planet,” or words to that effect.

 

Hm.

 

 

Does he realize that, if the planet dies, Britain goes with it?

 

 

Last, and most somber of all: another FT article seriously discussed the possibility that the human race is endangered.  One scientist, quoted in the article, thinks that we will hang on – but marginally, the way that Native American languages have survived in Mexico and South America.

 

 

Doesn’t that make you feel hopeful?

 

 

Me neither.

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Cherry blossoms in September

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It’s happening again this year.

 

 

Walking to work yesterday morning, I could see a filmy white cloud around some of the trees on the far side of the Providence River, as if they were in bloom.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Ridiculous, right?

 

 

I saw them close up later yesterday morning.  Yup.  In bloom, and lovely as an April day.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Waiting for the shuttle yesterday evening, I was examining the shrubbery nearby: some low-growing azalea-like thing.  And oh my dears it was plumb full of flower buds.

 

 

I know I wrote about this last November.  And I am a broken record on this subject anyway.

 

 

But the bloody climate is changing.  Isn’t it obvious? The plants are confused. They’re blooming at inappropriate times.

 

 

Back in the Northwest where I grew up, flowers bloomed deep into November and December; it was a gentler climate.  Those of you who are familiar with New England know that, while September and October can be (and usually are) glorious, they also (usually) grow gradually colder day by day.  I even remember seeing snow on the grass in October once or twice.

 

 

But that was quite a while back.

 

 

What can we do about this? Nothing, probably.  This is one of my “hopeless glance into a dark unfriendly future” blogs, in case you can’t tell.

 

 

The change will continue.  Maybe in a hundred years the Yukon and Nunavut will be garden spots.  (And maybe Copenhagen and New Orleans and poor low-lying Providence will be under water.)  Maybe Canada and Siberia will become the breadbaskets of the world.  (And maybe Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands will be washed away.)

 

 

Not to mention that I don’t do so well in warm weather.

 

 

Probably it’s a good thing that I won’t be around for much longer.  I’d be complaining incessantly.

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This crazy weather we've been having

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It's late November. And there are rhododendrons and magnolias, and lilies, and roses, blooming in our neighborhood. In New England.

I really didn't notice until about a week ago, when I noticed a few rhododendron blossoms here and there. Then I noticed the magnolia trees on the Brown campus were budding out, just the way they usually do in March and April, with those huge obscene buds. And what do you know? They popped.

It's colder and rainy today, and it will probably freeze tonight. So the trees have wasted a lot of energy for nothing.

This isn't really new. Two years or so ago, I was in downtown Providence around this time of year, and the cherry trees by Kennedy Plaza were in bloom.

In New England!

I first arrived in Rhode Island in 1978, six months after the big blizzard of that year. The winter of 1978/9 was snowy and bitterly cold; I got frostbite on my knuckles from carrying a suitcase down the street for twenty minutes without gloves on. Two years later, there was another bitterly cold winter, with wind chills down around twenty below.

Those days are past, however. We still get cold winters, but the timings are all off. The plants are confused. They're blooming in the wrong seasons, at the wrong times. Cold weather is followed by unexpected warm spells, and the plants go into panic mode, I think.

I'm no botanist, and I'm obviously no climate scientist. But things are changing, becoming more volatile. More than volatile: unpredictable.

And there's nothing to be done about it. Whether (as seems obvious to me) it's human interference, or whether it's simply part of some larger ice-age / pluvial-age / sunspot cycle, it's already begun, and nothing can stop it.

This is the grim thing about writing a blog called “FutureWorld.” I don't think the future is going to be a very nice place for the people who come after us. I don't think they'll have much to thank us for. I suspect they'll think of us pretty nastily; they'll know we did exactly what we felt like doing, and we left the place in a mess.

I'm so sorry, and I wish I could tell them so. I'm doing the stupid little bits and pieces than I can, to keep my footprint small and light. But I know that my contribution probably won't make a hell of a lot of difference.

I hope they forgive us.

This is Ursula LeGuin, in a poem written from the point of view of our descendants:

In your ending when the words were forgotten,

in your ending when the fires burned out,

in your ending when the walls fell down,

we were among you:

the children,

your children,

dying your dying to come closer,

to come into our world, to be born.

We were the sands of your sea-coasts,

the stones of your hearths. You did not know us.

We were the words you had no language for.

O our fathers and mothers!

We were always your children.

From the beginning, from the beginning,

we are your children.

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