Our Summer of Reckoning

Despite all the sunshine, it's the darkest summer I remember

I have wanted to write for you, for me, for anyone, but the words won’t come.

Fall and winter and spring are lovely – even when “climate crisis” things happen, it all seems so livable. Snow melts, ya silly! Dry out the shoes! Wear a sweater! You got this!

But I feel like something broke in me in June, when we hit temperatures hotter than the sun here in my part of the world. It was 44.5 degrees Celsius on my patio – something like 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Normally, it’s 21 to 26 degrees on a summer day. This is the “mildest” part of Canada, after all.

(Yes, I’ve handled Thailand, Yucatan, Cambodia, and other places where one must expect those temperatures — but their homes are not built to RETAIN heat. They’re near the equator with 13 hours a day of sun, whereas we were in the Solstice week — with 18 hours of sun and no time for it to cool off overnight. It was a 28-degree low for me one night, and it’s that sustained heat that proved fatal for hundreds of people in my province. My apartment doesn’t even get cross-breezes for airing it out; whereas homes in tropical regions are designed with them.)

It’s shocking to see flowers lately, because the ground is so dry it’s like hay that’s been curing in a barn for a season.

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My best friend was here last week. Sometimes I feel like he visits just to make sure I haven’t gone off a cliff of drama or something, which I appreciate. I wanted to explain to him where I was at, mentally, so I spent a lot of time sort of mulling through my headspace.

I realized then, and I’ve been realizing since June, that I’ve sort of been nursing some trauma responses – and not just this summer, but for years.

Nomadism plays out differently for everyone. For me, I was travelling with bad back problems, and it was something I was always trying to plan for – I’d zoom in on AirBNB photos to see if that was a chair I could handle sitting in for work, or imagining the table height. Is that bed firm enough?

It was a gamble, and a gamble with no refunds.

And four out of five times, it was all wrong. I spent so much time living in pain and there was nothing I could do about it. Worse, I constantly had my hopes up that the next apartment/town would be a better choice and I just had to survive this one to get to “better”. But better seldom ever came – just one disappointment after another, because my back was so unforgiving.

Palermo, Sicily was the last disappointment. I couldn’t handle it anymore — the roller coaster of hope and hopes dashed — and that’s when I quit.

It’s quite fitting that my last home abroad as a nomad was on a mountainside in Tirana, a terrible choice of neighbourhoods with little to no amenities easily walkable. Super for bad backs, dontcha know?

This was no mere “hill” – people had DONKEYS to get their groceries home, for crying out loud. And the bed was so bad that I eventually just pulled the mattress on the floor and slept down there.

Beds on the floor are SUPER for people with bad backs at age 46.

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So, with the end nigh, I kept telling myself how great it would be to get back to Canada and finally have security and routine around me.

A predictable, boring life. It sounded w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l.

Except I got my Ottawa apartment at the end of August 2019. I spent the fall getting my place set up – buying all the things, organizing and reorganizing for something workable. And then, as I finally started to catch my breath at Christmas, filling myself with hope for a nice, stable 2020, I heard of this mysterious pneumonia killing people in Wuhan, China.

So, while most people are traumatized after 1.5 years of pandemic uncertainty, I went from a self-inflicted uncertain and stressful 4+ years straight into the pandemic.

Then, I fled the pandemic in Ontario, because I knew it would get worse there with their bad leadership, in order to move to the safety of a neighbourhood I knew like the back of my hand – a safe, quiet place where nothing Really Bad ever happens. It’s… a boring place to live.

Boring is good for the girl who’s had nothing but adventure and chaos for a half-decade, though.

But in my first month here, fires raged up and down the coast, and we got socked in with smoke for weeks – and I had no air conditioner, no air purifier, and I’m deeply asthmatic. It was terrifying for me and began a year in which I’ve slowly become much more obsessed and fixated with the climate crisis.

Photo from the wildfire smoke this past weekend. That’s not a sunset — sunset is 90 minutes away.

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Still, I managed to be full of hope for this summer. I’d just had my first dose of vaccine! I was weeks from dose two! I could see friends! Entertain again! I had a wonderful garden! What a glorious summer I might have!

And then, the week of Solstice, literally the first week of summer, we had the highest temperatures ever recorded in Canada in my province and my town shattered every record we ever set too.

Being in gardening groups on Facebook, I heard so many people talking about all the food plants they lost. But worse was the news of hundreds of humans who’d perished in our heat. Our homes weren’t safe. Our food wasn’t safe. Being a pandemic, even our air wasn’t safe.

Personally, it took me five days to rehydrate after it was all said and done – something that makes me realize I was so much more struck by the heat than I realized. My being born with a rare, enigmatic kidney condition means extreme heat is bad, mmkay?

And with that, my summer was over before it began. Instead of being able to enjoy it, I’ve doomscrolled through reports of fires, heatwave forecasts, and more.

Sometimes, it’s still pretty and I can enjoy the world for what it is: Here, present, accessible. But I’m too aware of what’s going on to be in that moment for long. My mind starts racing with “what about 10 years from now? Five years?”

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Largely, I’ve sought that boring, predictable, sheltered life of no demands that I’d been dreaming of. For me, it’s been a summer of reality TV, gardening, cooking, and trying to avoid going into a really dark hole.

The latter thing – not entirely successful, I’m afraid. I mean, I can’t even watch dramas because plots are too much to follow as we West Coasters live through the summer of our Climate Crisis Reckoning.

Emotionally, spiritually, I’m done in. I’m trying to keep the brave face, but the reality is that I know I’m taking this really hard. Hope and faith are forsaking me this year.

To this day, I can’t remember the event that caused me to realize things had forever changed for me and I’d lost my childhood naivety – I was 11 or so and walking across our Safeway parking lot and I saw something that just hit me and made me realize my life was not necessarily everyone else’s life. I don’t remember the trigger, but I remember that feeling.

Innocence, gone in an instant. Awareness of a wider world, a world less fair, came instead.

I felt that again the morning I heard planes had hit the World Trade Center. I remember being weirded out by how peaceful the world was that morning as I rode the bus into work. I’d cut my cable that summer and had no TV, no news, no worries. It’d been such a beautiful September morning that I had coffee on my patio and just relaxed – not realizing that part of said peace was because no planes were landing at the airport. I’d always had a great view of planes coming in to land – so close one could make out company logos on the tail – but not that “blissfully quiet” morning.

My job was closed captioning – we’d all sit in silence with headphones on. But the moment I entered the office, I knew something was up. No headphones, people just going through the motions of typing, while a radio loudly recounted the attack. After a few minutes of listening, I remember turning to my colleague and saying, “I feel like everything I ever knew is over, and life will never be the same for us.”

Everyone mumbled “Yeah.” And we went back to silence and listened to the radio.

Spring — when grass was greener and the season to come seemed promising still.

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It’s hard to know what you’ve lost until the days wear on and you realize something isn’t right inside you or around you anymore.

And that’s what happened to me in June, but it was a slow burn – a 96-hour loss of innocence and assault on hope.

I know I’m not alone. So many of us are dealing with fear and a newly awakened reality that we’re not safe here – and if we’re not safe from the climate future on boring, predictable Vancouver Island, well, arguably there’s no place safe to go.

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This was the tweet that got me thinking about this post. I thought I was just replying to Marsha, but then 42 people “favourited” my tweet and a couple dozen more engaged me on it, and I realized I wasn’t alone in feeling trauma from this summer — and I don’t even have it as bad as many others do.

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But I’m acknowledging that, for me, it’s been nearly 7 years of one kind of uncertainty and insecurity after another. Some might attack me for claiming I’ve been traumatized in any way from travelling, which I was so incredibly privileged to do and will always be thankful I had the guts to ante up for, but the reality is that we can make choices to do things that we are glad to do, but which leave a mark. It happens. It can be a wonderful experience but also one that affects you – often negatively – at your core.

And that’s where I’m at. I’m just trying to keep my world together. And the idea of prioritizing writing or cutting myself open for other people’s entertainment right now is ludicrous to me.

I just don’t have that wherewithal in me right now. I long for it. It would be very nice indeed to go back to life this spring, when my days included a short walk, cool breezes, and a growing sense of place in the world.

It was nice pressing pause and writing through those days. But this summer – introspection has not been an attractive idea, because every time I look inward, all I can see is fear and worry.

And it’s not fear and worry about myself or my chances for success in my career and all of that – it’s fear and worry for everything we thought we knew about being alive on this planet.

Me hating everything when the smoke was endless last September and I had to wear a facemask inside my house and my home’s temperature was at 28-30 degrees indoors day after day because I couldn’t air it out. This year, I had an air purifier and an air conditioner and the recent spate of smoke was “fine” for me — but it’s not right that we should have to spend $1,000-2,000 on these appliances to make our homes survivable.

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As I consider last summer’s fires and this summer’s killer heatwave that pre-dated a wild summer of fires and droughts, I’m constantly asking myself, “How do we live in THIS future?”

When you’re talking about rising sea levels, it’s all very academic, isn’t it?

But when your world is literally on fire, it’s a whole other thing.

I’m sorry I don’t have a hopeful hook to end on, but I’m struggling with that. We’re at crisis point with the climate. We now have an election on call here in Canada and it’s our opportunity to make politicians hear it to their deepest bones that the climate is the number-one issue for all of us – BECAUSE IT IS.

Food security, our homes, even our lives now depend on what politicians do TODAY, THIS YEAR, because right now I’m already terrified of the summer of 2022.

So, if you do nothing else this year, please get involved in demanding politicians be accountable on climate change.

And as for me, I’m realizing this sense of existential dread is just a new thing we all have to live with. We can fight it, we can demand more, but somehow we need to live with it.

Once the rains come and the cool saltwater breeze is steady around me, and the leaves change from crunchy dull green to ochre and gold, I’ll find some calm and some peace and maybe that constant alarm bell of anxiety will stop ringing, and words will find their way through me again.

Please bear with me as I work through this.

I have many PERSONAL and PROFESSIONAL things to be hopeful for and I know, once the summer ends, I’ll breathe easier and have things to say.

For now, we all need to leverage ourselves with the reality that, technically, we have the tools to fight and arrest climate change where it is – but we need to act, and by “we,” I mean the world. So every bit of good we can do where each of us lives, it’ll help. And if that’s the hope we gotta hang our hats on, well, it’s a start, anyhow.