August 14, 2023

Trivial things sometimes take control of our lives for moments, sometimes longer. A few days ago I slid into a chair at the Country Café on U.S. 25 near Pickens, South Carolina. I was exhausted and hot after a hard mountain hike at nearby Table Rock State Park.

Usually I go straight home after these outings, but the road ahead was under construction, which meant a traffic tieup. I called Sandy, she said stop and get lunch. I turned off at the Country Café. I knew what I wanted, a cheeseburger and a Coke. The protein and sugar would help. The waitress—er, server, approached and offered a one-page laminated menu. I waved it aside.

“I’d like a cheeseburger and a large Coke,” I said.

“We have Pepsi, she said.

“Pepsi.”

The young woman glanced at the menu with her sparkling brown eyes.

“We have a cheeseburger platter, with fries and coleslaw. There’s no other option.”

I took the menu and looked it over. Right, cheeseburger platter, fries and coleslaw, $10.99.

“I don’t want fries,” I said.

“They come with it. With coleslaw.”

I didn’t want fries or coleslaw. I don’t like French fries. I just wanted a cheeseburger. Is there no way I could order only a cheeseburger?

She made the decision for me, actually no decision was needed since there was no other option. I would have to get the eleven-dollar platter or something else, a sandwich platter, dinner entrée, or salad. I didn’t want those, either.

I nodded, she smiled and walked away. I reminded myself I didn’t want fries. But it wasn’t important enough to get up and stomp out. No other restaurants were nearby.

The diner scene from the 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces, starring Jack Nicholson and Karen Black, flashed back. Bobby Dupea (Nicholson), in a booth with his girlfriend and two women hitchhikers, in that silky-smooth Nicholson voice, orders a plain omelet, coffee, a side order of wheat toast. But he wants tomatoes instead of potatoes.

“No substitutions,” the waitress announces.

“What do you mean, you don’t have any tomatoes?”

“Only what’s on the menu. You can have a plain #2 omelet, it comes with fries and rolls.”

“I know what it comes with, but it’s not what I want.”

Not to go on about it, but Dupea finally orders an omelet and a chicken salad sandwich, hold the butter, mayo, and lettuce. The angry waitress repeats his order. He then tells her to hold the chicken and bring him the toast and a check for the sandwich.

“Hold the chicken?” the waitress asks, incredulously.

Things explode. Dupea sweeps the table setting onto the floor, soaking the waitress, and he and the women are thrown out of the place. In the car one of them laughs at his cleverness in ordering toast. He answers, “Well, I didn’t get it, did I?”

I guessed I could have said, in a sarcastic Jack Nicholson tone, “Hold the fries, the bun, and the coleslaw, bring me the cheeseburger.” I’d still be on the hook for the price of the platter.  But I was too tired to go the Pieces route. The girl was sweet, I don’t think she’d throw me out.

She didn’t know me and wasn’t old enough to have seen the movie. She might have worried that if she served only the cheeseburger, I might make a scene and refuse to pay the full price for the platter. I nodded and went along with the platter-only rule.

She brought me a plastic plate with my cheeseburger enclosed in a giant bun, a mountain of fries, and a cup of coleslaw. I stared at it, then took the burger from the bun, ate it, guzzled my Pepsi, and pushed the rest away. A heavyset guy at the next table gave me a curious look. I thought for a second of offering him the fries. I asked for the check.

“I’ll get you at the register.” She rang me up. “That will be $17.55. The Pepsi was $4.45.”

“Okay,” I muttered, but I was thinking, wow, with a $3.00 tip that’s $20.00 for a cheeseburger.

Five Easy Pieces was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Jack Nicholson (he didn’t win). It’s not what anyone would call an uplifting story; more of the timeworn “men are angry, alone, and alienated” theme. But for that, it’s well done.

The diner scene shows Dupea, the Nicholson character, as quick-witted and clever, the waitress as cranky and obnoxious. So the audience laughs when Dupea sends the table setting crashing to the floor, the water spilling on the waitress. She got what she asked for, is the reflexive reaction.

I didn’t feel an urge to do what Dupea did.  This is a minor annoyance, way down the scale of minor annoyances. I should have forgotten about it. Some restaurants, especially diners with high customer turnover, do have a “no substitutions” rule. They’re probably thinking, what if somebody gets a non-menu item then argues about the charge?

So the rule may cause irritation. The customer does have the option the young woman didn’t mention, walking out. He would be angry at having to find another restaurant. The “no substitutions” restaurant would lose the business, the server would not get a tip. If he stayed the confrontation might continue, tempers might flare, as they did in the movie.

This is happening all the time. Right now, political figures are mudwrestling, calling each other corrupt, traitors, criminals, lunatics, exchanging ugly threats. Some of us are out of control, like Bobby and the waitress.

Things are not always the way we like. We don’t have to be awful to others. Only solution:  don’t let the problem get personal. Take the platter. You may not want it, but the alternative is worse. The lesson: move on.         

August 7, 2023

Love may lead us to joy, and hate to tragedy. For many, they lead to Shakespeare. Who hasn’t seen Romeo and Juliet? Or Hamlet or Macbeth—or at least heard of them? Or heard or read these lines: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth, Act 5, Sc.5, 27-31)

Those words are spoken by Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death, shortly before he is killed. That is, after he has murdered Duncan, king of Scotland and his guards, his friend Banquo, and ordered the murders of the wife and child of Lord Macduff.

An outfit called the Warehouse Theater, with support from the city, sponsored performances of Macbeth here for two weeks, admission free, on a makeshift stage in the city park.  Mitchell Grant, a construction superintendent for Habitat for Humanity, had the title role. Unlike most of the amateur cast, Grant received professional training, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London. His practiced, powerful voice boomed across the park with the agonized authority and pathos of the character.

Macbeth, as Shakespeare readers and watchers know, is a nobleman, the Thane of Glamis, in Duncan’s Scotland. After victory against the rebel MacDonwald, Duncan gives Macbeth a higher rank. But the promotion ignites Macbeth’s and his wife’s murderous lust for power. He and Lady Macbeth die pitiful, violent deaths.

The Bard still lives in performances of his work, famously at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-on-Avon, where he was born (1564) and died (1616), and everywhere else. He studied Latin and classics, but did not have the university education of well-known scholars and writers of the time. In his twenties he moved to London and became an actor, writer, and part-owner of a theater company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. One story is that he became involved in theater by caring for the horses of theatergoers.

He wrote and wrote, sometimes in anonymous collaborations, the histories, the tragedies, the comedies. In 1599 his company built the famous Globe Theater, where his plays were performed. He acted in his own plays and those of others.

The chronology of his life and work is enchanting, history in its purest form. He returned to Stratford at about age 49 and died at 52 in a house called New Place. The house no longer exists, the site is owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Many years ago, while in high school and college, I rode a bus, sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, from Jersey into New York City to attend summer performances of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Like most Shakespeare festivals around the world, the shows were free. You waited in line for your tickets.

The theater had no seats, you brought your own chair or sat on the grass. I recall seeing the tragedy Titus Andronicus, the history Richard III, a couple of others. The shows ended around midnight, in time for me to catch the last bus.

To say that Shakespeare’s work defines the sweetness and beauty of the English language is a given and an understatement. Those who struggle to write well, and those who appreciate authentic literature, recognize the abuse it has taken over the centuries since the Bard wrote these lines: 

“All the world’s a stage, the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” (As You Like It, Act 2, Sc.7, 146-149).

Or:

“If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts Against their father, fool me not so much, To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, Stain my man’s cheeks!” (King Lear, Act 2, Sc.4, 315-319).

Or:

“Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end. For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, ‘tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at. I am not what I am.”  (Othello Act I.Sc.1, 65-71)

Written English appears in limitless shades, from great literature to graffiti. Today we get this immortal prose from the former, once more indicted president’s campaign: “The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.”

Shakespeare’s story always has been flavored by legend and myth: that he plagiarized the work of others; that others wrote the plays and he took the credit; and so on. But we have the 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three longer poems. We know his genius.

Shakespeare elevates English to a kind of art form. His plays probe the depths of the human heart and the unknowable range of the power of men and women to create and act on ideas, emotions, desires, and ambitions, for good and evil. We cannot read A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Hamlet without coming away awed at his insights into our own lives.

So the plays are performed in hundreds of small towns and large cities worldwide, more than 400 years after his death. The Greenville Warehouse Theater’s series concluded last week. As the play ends with Macbeth’s death, Malcolm, Duncan’s son, then steps forward and promises a return to civility and honor in Scotland.

The audience, stunned, stood and applauded. They came to enjoy a warm summer evening in the park, and as a bonus watch a famous play. They witnessed a performance of power, a study of the tragedy but also the dignity of the human condition. Lovers of language, written and spoken, will be back next summer, here, and everywhere.

July 31, 2023

The streets of Wilmington, N.C., are filled with tourists these hot summer days. If any want to cool off, the Wrightsville and Carolina beaches are close. The city sits astride a peninsula, bounded by the fast-flowing Cape Fear River and the Atlantic. The river separates it from tidal marshes and spreading suburbs. The decommissioned battleship North Carolina lies at anchor across the river from downtown.

Beautiful old homes line the streets of Wilmington’s historic neighborhood, which surrounds the old Catholic basilica, St. Mary’s and the First Presbyterian Church. The riverfront is a tourist bar/café strip. Farther uptown is a compact business district, where cotton and slaves once were sold. Pricey two-story condos built as houseboats are tied up along the river, fitted with outboard motors for maneuvering among the quays.

Freighters and containerships sail up the Cape Fear to unload at a pier east of town. Miles of tidal flatness and scrub forest extend from the river to the north, south, and west.

Wilmington once was the state’s largest city. In 1898 a White supremacist uprising against the Black-majority municipal government killed some 60 people. Jim Crow segregationist laws and practices settled in, as throughout most of the South, and racial tensions simmered in the city for decades.

We’ve visited the town a half-dozen times while staying with friends in Leland, just across the Cape Fear. They moved from our Virginia hometown years ago and built their own place when Wilmington-area real estate was starting to explode. Today U.S. 17, the main route down the coast, is lined with new residential subdivisions, strip malls, and golf courses. Signs along 17 point to hurricane evacuation routes. This stretch of coast usually is a target.

From upstate South Carolina the Wilmington trip is a tough one via four interstates, 385, 26, 20,  95, and someday-to-be I-74. On 26 we meet the beach people transiting the sweltering midstate past Columbia en route to the romantically nicknamed Low Country, with its interminable flat scrub woods and marshes. Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and Hilton Head are the big draws.

Apart from Wilmington’s chic downtown and old homes, the visitor may pick up an odd sense of distance, separation. The Tarheel State is a brilliant kaleidoscope: spectacular peaks west of Asheville that meld with the wide central piedmont and its cosmopolitan urban centers, Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston-Salem. Bryson City, at the far western tip of the state and a gateway to Great Smoky National Park and Tennessee, is almost 400 miles from Wilmington.

The eccentric coastal strip stretches east from I-95. The terrain flattens out. Two roads, I-40 and hybrid 74 cross rural, near-empty country for 100 miles. Eventually the Cape Fear winds by and Wilmington appears, breaking up the scrub forest. North of the city a couple of Marine Corps bases, Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point, and some scattered out-of-the way tidal places are all that line the waterfront. Offshore are uninhabited barrier islands.

Thirty miles south of Wilmington is Southport, a tourist stop at the wide mouth of the Cape Fear, which also is the Intercoastal Waterway in these parts. It’s a pretty spot on the water, rich with pre-Revolutionary War history, and now souvenir shops and seafood places. Beyond the town is south-facing Oak Island, a vacation destination packed with rentals, summer businesses, and expensive homes, which now are being built on stilts.

We drove across the island with friends and stopped at a community marina and walked across the sand. The beach stretches east back to Bald Head Island, and west to Holden and Sunset beaches, as the shoreline curls south.

The late afternoon sky was overcast, promising rain. A stiff breeze whipped the surf. The water was a pale brown, reminding us that the soft, deep beach sand had been dredged from offshore, at a cost of millions, to provide a playground for the locals and vacationers. Sand has been molded by plows into fake dunes, and beach grass planted to anchor them.

We all have heard the stories about what the ocean is doing to East Coast beaches. As the seas rise with worldwide climate change, the coastlines are giving up inches each year to the rapacious surf. Retirees and dreamers who sunk big money into ostentatious beach-facing homes now peer nervously through their living room windows at the flood tides. After each storm a few houses go missing.

We walked a bit, took pictures, sloshed in the eerily warm incoming tide. A few souls stood knee-deep here and there, but the crowd was thinning. I looked out at the horizon, a few faint ship silhouettes broke the line where sea meets sky. On that spit of land on the far eastern rim of the country, the colorful complexity of this huge state seemed remote. The sea, as it roared and crashed on the beach, soothed our spirits.

The narrow, flat, humid Wilmington-Southport strip seems a kind of distant outpost. It could be a last stop for old folks who love the sea but can’t stomach Florida, and for Carolina westerners and mid-staters who need their escape from mountains and work. It was a happy spot, after all, a seaside resting place wedged between the hundreds of miles of tidal desert north to Elizabeth City, just below Virginia, and south to Myrtle Beach.

The remoteness struck a chord. It’s hard to find this place, sequestered from interstates and cities. We know others, Virginia Beach, Ocean City, Rehoboth, all perched at the ends of traffic-choked highways. I thought then of Amagansett, at the far eastern end of Long Island, N.Y., the still-hidden gem of the Atlantic seacoast, that also faces south.

Four years ago Sandy and I drove to the Island and stood on the near-empty Amagansett beach, watching the dark cold sea crash against the sand. Nearby were the cottages my folks rented for our summer trips, unchanged over 60 years. I recalled my little-kid adventures there, before starting high school.

As we walked to the Oak Island parking lot, a warm breeze roiled the beach grass, warning of the coming storm. I looked at the stunted trees, the dark tidal pool, the hazy horizon. This end of the earth is different, a little strange. Someday we’ll pause here again. Maybe.                    

July 24, 2023

Some milestones are worth a deep breath. Starting your eighth decade is one. It came for Sandy this past Friday, between getting home from Philadelphia and a grinding interstate drive to the coast.

The important birthdays resurrect others. In 2021, from the Sunset Deck of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, we peered out towards the Smokies and Tennessee. Last mid-July, during the weeks-long nationwide steambath, we stared at shimmering Lake Lure, a pretty patch of clear blue below Chimney Rock mountain near Bat Cave, N.C.

I put on a party for her 65th that our Virginia place. I recruited the kids and as many relatives and friends as I could fit in the house. That splendid little celebration set the stage for moving forward; we hope for more of them, after all.

A year later she spent her 66th in the ICU at a stroke center in Bryn Mawr, Penn. Although she can’t remember that Sunday morning, she was in the MRI chamber. It clanked away, scanning her brain. For months after we trooped to specialists for tests and prescriptions.

Four years later everything is different. We left the old world behind for the same reasons anyone does. The Virginia neighborhood seemed old—not scruffy, as if the houses up and down the block were shabbier, the lawns overgrown, the streets potholed. There was some of that. But it reminded us that we’re old. Thirty-three years is a long time in a place.

We saw the same reasons for leaving other retired people see: traffic gridlock that reaches from the interstate to local roads, relentless retail and residential growth, the property tax inflation, the panicky calculations old timers make about that dreary subject, property values.

Arriving here we could see the end of the Blue Ridge from our apartment complex. Virginia has its mountains, but the Shenandoahs are more of a tourist attraction. Here, the low sloping peaks are part of the city scenery. The pale blue horizon is an invitation to explore a wide swath of rugged, nearly empty country, of rushing forest creeks that explode over waterfalls, out to the spectacular fast-flowing Chattooga River next to Georgia.

Greenville is nestled near the northwest-extreme point of the South Carolina pie slice, the coastline being the wide edge. The place is booming, with tech-based industry that replaced the once-dominating textile mills, the low-wage employers that abandoned the area and sent their work and their capital to Asia.

The town doesn’t have a rich historical heritage. No decisive Civil War battles were fought here.  Union troops only arrived after the rebels’ surrender, in pursuit of fugitive Jefferson Davis. The town still had to move forward. Somehow the mountain-piedmont remoteness brought people, and still does.

We came, the idea being to move forward. The family connection is here. Our closest ties, a daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons also are newcomers. They could leave. There must be something else. You like to think that the resettlement decision is final, that your reluctant move is the only one you’ll make.

Our rented place was a base for exploration. We headed to Walhalla, in the northwest corner of the state, beyond Clemson and the big lakes, Jocassee and Keowee. We drove up and down the main street and through neighborhoods of stately homes, and tramped through Oconee County’s three museums.

We drove through Easley, a little closer in, then Traveler’s Rest, a hamlet of cute shops linked to the city by the 25-mile Swamp Rabbit Trail. We headed north into the sticks, past gorgeous but remote rural places on wide stretches of property. Then we turned south and found giant new subdivisions going up in Simpsonville, Mauldin, and Fountain Inn.

We bought a kitchen table from a lady in one of those places, I can’t remember which. But the development resembles the same goings-on in Virginia, Maryland, anywhere else. The relentless home- and condominium-building, on lots bulldozed bare of nature, reprises the construction onslaughts of the 1950s Levittown builders. The difference here is the iridescent-red South Carolina clay that erupts wherever a shovel touches soil.

We looked north, south, east, west. We drove through the city’s pricey “historic districts” clustered north and east of downtown. The antebellum homes are set off by wide wraparound porches that invite the notion of a genteel life of coffee, mint juleps, and neighborly chats.

The city, like lots of others, is broken into subdivisions, all with names, as if a name is required by ordinance: They range from the ordinary, Riverside Glen and Merrifield Park, to the eclectic: Botany Woods, Avalon Reserve, The Brio, Montebello. I feel prizes should be given for names conveying a definitive upscale lilt.

Time didn’t stand still through all this. The apartment, near downtown, the hospital, and doctors’ offices, began to feel like home. We stared at the second bedroom, crammed to the ceiling with the furniture and boxes we don’t need but couldn’t part with.  The househunting jaunts got shorter, more perfunctory. We walked through houses and condos and a couple of those “60 or better” ghettoes where bridge and now pickleball are the rage.

I had a birthday three months after the move but barely noticed. A nurse at the hospital recommended Waynesville, N.C., as a must-see. We drove to the “Gateway to the Smokies” and gazed at the brown mountains, some topped with snow. The Smokies air was bright and invigorating, as it is in Virginia’s Massanuttens. This might work for us, I thought.

We took the long way home on U.S. 276, the winding state road through the Pisgah National Forest. It still was cold when we stopped at lovely, thundering Looking Glass Falls. My teeth chattered as I snapped photos. Within a few miles, in Brevard, the road levels, the chill abates. Then the highway heads into the South Carolina peaks and more hair-raising turns and climbs.

A month later Sandy, not an excuse-maker like me, found a house. She looked at her checklist, jumped on the process, called the sales agent. We crossed Walhalla, Simpsonville, Waynesville and the rest off the list. This is her third birthday in this place. More to follow.

July 17, 2023

The AC is roaring up and down our street. The air was comfortable and cool early last Tuesday, but the forecast called for temps rising to around 95F, with a faint chance of a shower mid-week “It will be beautiful if you can take the heat,” the weather reporter said.

On Thursday I got in my car, which was sitting in the sun-blazed driveway. The dashboard thermometer registered 100F.

The southwestern tip of the Blue Ridge crosses just north of Greenville S.C., protecting most of the state from the violent fronts that slide up from the Deep South to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. South Carolina doesn’t get the hellacious weather, the tornadoes and torrential rains that lash the Big Red Three—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But it does get hot.

The local-forecast guy, like all of them, perseverates on small temperature variations from this county to that one, one suburb to the next. He made another weak joke about how we can enjoy the sunshine, but didn’t dwell on it. No one is going outside in this heat. The community pool is silent, the water inviting but still.

Millions, including ourselves, have moved south for the lovely, mild weather we usually get. They endured Northeast and Midwest winters, the ice, snow, chilling winds, and dangerous driving conditions three or four months of the year. The northern Virginia winters aren’t like those in Maine or Minnesota, but we got the Potomac Valley humidity. A dose of cold, with the dampness, goes right through all your layers.

Many Yankees dream of the Sunbelt lifestyle and all it brings: warm sun, wide beaches, lush lawns and gardens glowing with azaleas and zinnias. They long to throw away their windshield scrapers and snow shovels. Last winter in these parts we had exactly no snow, zero, zilch. Schoolkids never had a “weather day.” Most of the year we were outdoors in shirtsleeves. When it’s chilly a light jacket usually is enough. Folks lounge outdoors at the downtown restaurants and bars. Joggers are everywhere, golfers never miss a tee time unless it rains.

The Northern immigrants don’t think about the flip side of Southern weather: the suffocating summer heat we’re getting right now, starting before 9:00 AM and lasting until after dark. Most of the Southeast has settled into the low- to mid-90s by June. We’re watching the “heat-index,” the calculation of misery that combines heat and humidity. You don’t want to go outside.

Newcomers know the South gets warm. Going back a couple of generations, the introduction of air conditioning in homes and industry made moving south thinkable, and brought a measure of prosperity to the historically slow-moving Southern economies.

Today, when the heat gets intense, Southerners live in what the climate-change activists call the air-conditioning bubble. They burn fossil fuels to keep cool just as they did in the North to keep warm, making the planet warmer.

A Connecticut friend who didn’t migrate said: “In the North in winter you run from your heated car to your heated house. In the South in summer you run from your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned house.” Life balances out.

Last week here it was consistently mid-90s in daylight, high-70s at night, no end in sight. We’re heading for hotter this week. Something is different.

The weather reports are covering the scorching heat elsewhere. The mercury would reach 120 in Phoenix and environs, and exceed 110 around Texas, no one knows for how long. Last Tuesday it was 105 in El Paso at 7 PM. It was 116 at 5 PM a few days ago in Death Valley, but the forecast there is a chance for 130.

In British Columbia in 2021, 120-degree heat killed 600 people. The journal Nature Medicine reports that nearly 62,000 people died in Europe from heat-related causes in summer 2022. Europe is looking at another heat wave. The ice cap and the glaciers are melting.

We browsed Jeff Godell’s The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.  Godell joins countless other climate scientists, journalists, and symposia speakers who spell out an approaching worldwide crisis. In 1992 Al Gore published Earth in the Balance and in 2006 An Inconvenient Truth, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2017 Gore came out with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started lobbying Sweden’s Parliament about cutting the country’s carbon footprint.

The Godell book is harder-edged. He doesn’t report on “climate change,” the neutral term that could mean all sorts of things that may be harmful or not. He writes that the result of excessive heat on the human body is, simply, death. At 102 or 103 you begin to feel dazed and may pass out. At 106 the body experiences convulsions and seizures. At 107, organs begin to fail. A reviewer quoted him: “At the most fundamental level, your body unravels … your insides melt and disintegrate … you are hemorrhaging everywhere.”     

Godell tells of nightmares and tragedies. In August 2021 a California couple and their infant and dog all died while hiking near their home when the temperature rose to 109. That same year a Guatemalan farm worker collapsed and died in an Oregon field during the heatwave.

Higher temperatures are stoking freak weather. In Pennsylvania last weekend, rain beat down in torrents, recreating the woodland outside our son’s and daughter-in-law’s rear windows as a tropical rainforest. The moisture-filled gray-and-black clouds were stalled over New York and northern New England, bringing hundred-year floods to Vermont.

Our flight home from Philadelphia was delayed because of the foul weather farther north. When we arrived home that evening I mowed the lawn to avoid the next day’s heat. The fragile outdoor plants had died. I went for a run in the morning but cut it short, gasping. We hunkered down in the AC bubble.

None of this is new. We hope our grandkids will listen to Godell’s warning after he, and we, have departed. But climate change is a political hobbyhorse. Some—actually many—ask, hey, how about the huge California snows of last winter? The consequences of global warming, grotesque weather permutations including blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, and forest fires, are buried in the science. The science is vastly complex, and the scientists aren’t in charge. Political leaders don’t think 50 or 100 years out. It’s hard to get elected blasting the energy industry.

Americans like their American lifestyle, including their imports from China, the world’s biggest source of fossil emissions. We may all be driving electric cars in 2040. But here’s a guess:  It will be hot. We’ll still be hiding in that air-conditioning bubble.