The Substance of Heat
The Laurelhurst Theater, suggesting a city’s desolation.
I took a walk yesterday a little after noon. It was already 108° (42° C), on the way to a high of 116. That doesn’t express the experience of a noontime scorcher, especially one following two previous record-setting days. The inside of our house, which has never gotten above 83° in any previous heat wave, started the day at 85. Pockets of water vapor, which cling to the underside of leaves, hide in the soil, and cool dark shadows, boiled away days ago. No coolness persisted anywhere in the city, which had the heat of the fiery sun layered on top of the radiant heat trapped in surfaces. The air became a saturated incandescence no thermometer can accurately measure.
The experience of walking into that heat is one of encountering a substance, as when diving into a pool. Under the midday shade, the heat merely presses down on the skin like heavy cloth. As I started my walk, I breathed more shallowly, pulling in air gingerly, but a sense of satisfaction came with the intensity of the experience. Direct sunlight, however, stung like acid. It felt as if the radiation was penetrating into my skin, past the epidermis and down into deeper levels. It took me several minutes to walk from my house four blocks to East Burnside, and not just because I was scuttling from tree to tree to protect myself from the acid light.
A wide thoroughfare, Burnside is normally thick with traffic on a Monday afternoon. Yet the street was mostly still, disturbed only momentarily when small clots of cars freed by green lights passed lazily by. Businesses had gamely tried to stay open on Saturday, but by Monday they were keeping their doors. The city had an eerie, mid-Covid feel of desolation.
This feeling of a substance invading the city is becoming all too familiar. The current catastrophe is unimaginable for most Portlanders—and for a city where 90° is a hot day and many lack air conditioning, it is a catastrophe. Never has the mercury climbed above 107°, and it hasn’t gotten that hot in forty years. In the span of three days we saw a record 108 degrees followed by 111° and, a few hours after my walk, a high just one degree below the all-time high in Las Vegas. And all of this is happening in June, which has been historically cool and wet. The axiom around here is “summer doesn’t start until the fourth of July.” That a run of three record-breaking days would arrive not in July or August but June is especially unnerving.
Of course, a year and a half ago, the streets were emptied for a different reason. The substance then was too small to identify, certainly too small to see. In fact, we stayed inside because we couldn’t see it. Then in the fall, the Oregon skies turned brown as particles of Douglas fir, burned to ashy flecks, filled the sky. I can’t tell if the strife I feel vibrating in the air—from toxic politics to the reality of institutionalized racism and the violence it begets—is physically present or a conjuration of mind. But it’s real enough either way, unsettling something inside of me the way a small animal feels a coming storm. The malevolence hangs in the air like a scent.
A deserted East Burnside.
In most Junes, the weeds growing from the pavement would still be bright, lively green.
I’ve been doing my best to restore my sense balance. Fully vaccinated since the start of May, I’ve been happily returning to breweries. Because the warmth returned, I sometimes sit outside. Other times, I gleefully plunge indoors and marvel at the ordinariness of the experience. At first, breweries were having a hard time getting their draft stores up. On an early visit to Migration, I found the taps devastated. Throngs were tearing through their scant stocks faster than even the online menus could track. I had to walk inside to see what was actually left. In recent weeks, breweries have caught up, and I have been so impressed with their beer. It’s obvious brewers have been thinking a lot about beer these long months, preparing to unleash their best stuff on a thirsty public. In a couple weeks I plan to have another best breweries list for the city, and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do it.
I never quite find my balance, though. For weeks, there has been the question of masks. Oregon is fewer than 20,000 vaccinations from reaching the Governor’s 70% threshold for people over 16 years, but as with the US more broadly, it has become a political issue. Rural, Republican counties like Malheur and Lake have woeful rates (around 35%), while urban counties have more than double the percent of vaccinated. Although the CDC and health care officials tell us it’s safe for vaccinated people to resume normal activity, cruising around without a mask still feels like a signal of disregard—another political statement. Once we could encounter one another on the street free of preconceptions, and now we regard our fellow citizens with suspicion.
On the Covid-era dining block of SE Ankeny, people constantly avail themselves of these tables.
The place was packed during a snowstorm in February. But yesterday, not a soul.
Following each new disruption, I keep looking for a return. Normalcy can’t be that hard to restore. Yet each crisis carries darker connotations than the event itself. Although this heat will surely kill many people, most of us could ride out the wave like a natural disaster. Yet no one experiencing this presence can help feeling that it is only the start of a new climate that will entirely remake the Northwest. California no longer has fire seasons—they burn year round. Eventually the forests will be so small fires won’t pose a threat. I used to think such change was decades away for us—but baking under a sun as hot as Riyadh’s makes me think the future is coming much faster.
The wet part of the Pacific Northwest has a distinctive culture. It’s insular, quirky, gentle—possibly a bit depressive—and orderly. I joke that Portland is the city that sleeps. (It’s also the city that drinks in pubs—because of a constant drizzle.) Those characteristics come as much from the climate as anything. People behave differently when it’s cloudy nine months a year than they do when the sun burns in the sky year-round. What happens when Portland turns into Sacramento? As I sit on a Monday afternoon under a cascade of air-conditioning in the one room in the house that has it, these thoughts weigh on my mind.
Epilogue
The heat broke last night at 7:40. When Sally and I sat down in our little air-conditioned lair to watch The Nevers at 7:30, it was still 108°. During the next hour, marine air pushed onshore, bringing cool and fresh evening scents. By 8:30 the weather apps said it was 97°, but it was even cooler—they just couldn’t keep up with the speed of the drop. We went for a walk through the deserted city. In twenty minutes we saw a single car. A few folks were coming out, though, blinking in the cool as if surveying a post-apocalyptic world. By 9:00 it was 90 and by 10 it was 79—thirty degrees in two and a half hours. Ultimately it got down to 65, which is normalish for this time of year.
None of that did anything to lessen the sense of a strange visitation. It will be some time before I feel normal again.