yesterday broke 100 degrees fahrenheit.
or not broke, exactly. monday too had bested the double digits
this has happened 8 other times.
to be clear: by "this" i don't mean back-to-back triple-digit-days.
nor do i mean 101 degree july 5ths, or 6ths.
i mean that this little bend in the Connecticut river has seen ten days this hot in recorded history, and two of them happened in the last 48 hours.
3 out of 10 since i graduated college.
to account for the next 3 you have to go back to the summer that the civil rights act was passed.
but since the dawn of the standardized mercury thermometer in western massachusetts, every single day above 100 has come since the birth of Queen Elizabeth II.
The front page of tomorrow's paper lists another ten days. On these ten days, residents of New England drew more electricity from our coal-and-nuclear grid than at any other time in history. None of these days is so much as 5 years distant.
The front page of tomorrow's paper lists another ten days. On these ten days, residents of New England drew more electricity from our coal-and-nuclear grid than at any other time in history. None of these days is so much as 5 years distant.
this morning the dial in the shade outside the kitchen window read 90 degrees by 10AM, while the cylinder out the back door catches a glint of sun, and reads above 110. officially, this is not another 100 degree day. The Official Thermometer can sit in the shade all day and lose no credibility.
residents of the United States have a long and distinguished history of believing themselves outside of history, or avatars of the driving forces of history, or witnesses to the denouement. Being all of these at once, history is reduced to teleology, an ugly fable to which we are the moral. We speed towards ourselves along this story's only trajectory, which is a brutal process of elimination.
Yesterday I waded barefoot through a riverbed lined with smooth stones, pottery shards and bits of brick with edges worn round. I watched the sun set over a field of feral peas and brassicas, sitting in among the Queen Anne's Lace in a stand of sumac. The field has been pocumtuc land, the border territory with nipmuc, then logged and farmed for a hundred years. Just over the rise, 205 years, one month and 2 days ago, on a hill called Pancake Plain, two irishmen, Dominic and James, were hanged for murder and with scant evidence. Farmland, a few trees, and a crowd of fifteen thousands looked on. Fifty years on, the field was farmed again, now by the inmates of a State Asylum. In the quiet of the baking sun, the sumac grows back in the poor soil, and the remains of an Institutional foundation and its attendant coal boiler fall slowly down the hill behind me.
I watch the sun set on what may not be the hottest day of the year, and i listen to the highway,
and i wonder if America only concerns himself with the end of the World because he has already ended so many of them.
Yesterday I waded barefoot through a riverbed lined with smooth stones, pottery shards and bits of brick with edges worn round. I watched the sun set over a field of feral peas and brassicas, sitting in among the Queen Anne's Lace in a stand of sumac. The field has been pocumtuc land, the border territory with nipmuc, then logged and farmed for a hundred years. Just over the rise, 205 years, one month and 2 days ago, on a hill called Pancake Plain, two irishmen, Dominic and James, were hanged for murder and with scant evidence. Farmland, a few trees, and a crowd of fifteen thousands looked on. Fifty years on, the field was farmed again, now by the inmates of a State Asylum. In the quiet of the baking sun, the sumac grows back in the poor soil, and the remains of an Institutional foundation and its attendant coal boiler fall slowly down the hill behind me.
I watch the sun set on what may not be the hottest day of the year, and i listen to the highway,
and i wonder if America only concerns himself with the end of the World because he has already ended so many of them.
Have I said, recently and loudly, that I love you?
ReplyDeleteBecause I fucking LOVE YOU.
this makes me ache for the scenery of which you speak so beautifully. makes me long to be there, and heartbroken as to what it has become...what my legacy has made it to be. but i still want to come back.
ReplyDeletei WILL come back. maybe in a year. will you be there? we can start a revolution together. ok?