Summer sliding down...

The long, hot summer is upon us.  August is pretty miserable out here.  It is muggy, hot, and the sweat just streams down my face with any exertion.  I am sitting indoors with the air on.  I try to keep it around 80 degrees (84 at night).  In June and July this is quite pleasant, but in August, nothing works.  I can't bring myself to lower the temp, as the cost of electricity spurs me on to new heights of energy watchfulness!!  So I sit in front of a fan.  I can't stand it, though, and every so often I have to go outside...to check the tortoises, to weed, clean the patio, water, sweep.  Anything to be outside.  Then I have to come in once I am drenched.  All my plants are struggling to make it.  One actually melted (at least that is what it looks like) in the heat from the past two weeks. I try new ones every year to see what will make it and what will not (I have a collection of plants from South America and South Africa).

In spite of it all, I find things to fascinate me.  The sky is one.  In the early morning, when the temps are down, the desert has a light haze over it, causing the sky to be a pale blue.  No clouds are apparent.  By mid morning thunderheads have formed over the ring of mountains around us, concentrating some of that moisture and some of the deep desert blue sky pops out among the clouds.  By evening, the winds pick up and blow some of the clouds away, leaving a few puffy ones scattered across the vast arch of sky.  The humidity does not seem so brutal at night.  It is a beautiful changing scene.

Blue skies presage fall.

I am waiting for the first touch of fall: we are only 3 weeks away from the fall solstice.  Even now, the evenings are hot but a cooling wind is blowing and it is pleasant out once the sun has dipped below the horizon.  Today, the sky was hot an blue, no trace of the humidity that has been plaguing us.  Just a fall teaser....

travelling, travelling

Old railroad bridge on the Oregon coast.

people are the same no matter where i travel to
i go to see what's new and fresh
to sweeten bitter eyes
i go to look on different skies
     less blue and bright
     with different stars
to taste salty wind not filled with gritty dust
and talk to folks whose view is not the one i hold

who see foggy crags and forests dark
swept clean by snows and icy winds
and hilltops bright and sinister
topped by blinding glaciers and
rivers that are most like lakes to me
and grasses blowing in clean winds
bending, seed heads bowing in submission
to summer's fading brow

crashing waves and smokey skies
and drought cracked lands
and golden fields drenched in dear-bought water
and birds of a different color
silver salmon leaping
frogs croaking mightily
hawks and eagles circling lazily on a different
thermal draft

but people are the same
no matter what road i travel on 

California's bread basket

Headed for parts north this week, escaping the summer heat.  It was warm the first two days, but not as bad as the 115 + humidity in Palm Springs!  So, I became part snowbird and headed up to the Olympic Peninsula for a week.  Arrived today in Lacey, after 3 days of driving through  the heartland of both California and Oregon.

Corn in the Central Valley

It was awesome and disturbing.  Everywhere you looked there were fields of crops:  corn, trees of some fruit or nut, grains and other things I could not recognize from the road.  Immense watering wheels and sprinklers, field workers.  The smell of the air was hay and dust and the hot, wet smell of watered soil.

The smells of the air were so distinctive all along the way.  The smell of hay, or at least dried, cut grasses, was dominant until north of Sacramento.  There I noticed a pungent, almost bitter smell that was heavy, making breathing a bit challenging.  Not that I couldn't breath, just that I was aware of my lungs pumping.  I did not know what it was, until I made a wrong turn looking for a Wildlife Refuge.  I drove along this country road and noticed a small biplane swooping in low, banking sharply, then reversing its trajectory.  I swung my car to the side of the road, and hopped out with my camera.  Sure enough it was spraying up and down the fields south of the road.  I'll be that was the smell.  It was disturbing, because there I was, there people in their cars were, and there were the field hands laboring in the neighboring fields.

It was a bit disturbing.  This, of course, brought up thoughts of Monsanto and patented (!) seeds, loss of small farmers, monoculture, GMO foods and Monsanto, water rights and dams, and So Cal desperate for water, salmon struggling, heirloom seeds and native food heritage, agri-business and buying avocados and persimmons from Mexico when they are grown in my own back yard.

Biplane spraying north of Sacramento

And most disturbing of all, when you see this,  miles and miles and miles of it, one can't help but wonder if the things I do to try to help (buy organic, plant a desert landscape, conserve energy) isn't a pathetically insignificant thing.  What can the likes of me do about it?