August 23, 2021

I guess the air conditioning unit died weeks ago if not months ago. It died a lingering death. We knew it was not well. Eventually I called a contractor to look at it. He inspected the device in the backyard, called the condenser, and climbed into the attic over the bathroom to check whatever was up there. He climbed back down with an unhappy story.

Weeks ago we read about and watched the TV coverage of the nightmare “heat dome” over the Pacific Northwest, that moved to the Midwest. Innocent people lived through triple-digit temperatures, many if not most without air conditioning. Hundreds died.

As summer approached I heard the usual radio and TV ads by heating/air-conditioning companies of discounts on HVAC system inspections. Through many summers in Virginia we never had problems, usually Sandy kept the house too cold for me. So I ignored the commercials. In early June, when it got warm enough to need or want air-conditioning, we switched on the system and waited. A feeble flow of lukewarm air wafted from the vents. We set the thermostat at 73F, the temperature settled into the low 80s. The system cranked away, all day and all night. The temperature never broke 80. Well, I thought, we were new in this house. Maybe it was working out the kinks. We turned on the ceiling fans.

Sandy and I both grew up in homes without air conditioning. In southern Tennessee she and her family, and many if not most families in those parts endured the five-month-long Southern summer with fans and open windows. I recall lying awake sweating on summer nights in northern New Jersey. Over time more and more homeowners in our neighborhood put in window units and eventually central air. Yet millions of Americans have never had air conditioning. When did it become indispensable?

I read that smart people built primitive air conditioners over the past couple of hundred years. In 1901 Willis Carrier built the first modern air-conditioning unit. Later he formed the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America. Someone found that in 2019 about 90 percent of new U.S. homes were built with air conditioning (more in the South than elsewhere).  A generation ago air conditioning contributed to the economic growth of the so-called Sunbelt. Earlier, Southern states were mainly sleepy agricultural places, producing cotton, tobacco, indigo, home-raised vegetables. Over time, they recognized they needed air conditioning to attract Northern industry.

Our son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline visited last month. He said they keep their AC at 71, cooler at night. They arrived on a hot day. We all gathered for dinner, it was stifling. Michael got on a chair and held his hand in front of a ceiling vent. “It’s blowing warm air,” he said. “You need to get someone out here.” Okay, I said. We changed the filter. The ceiling fans blew the warm air around. The guest room never cooled off, Michael and Caroline finally opened the windows. When we rode downtown with them the next day they had the car air-conditioning on full blast.

It seemed to cool off for a few days. The house seemed comfortable. In my home maintenance dreamworld, in which things really aren’t so bad, I postpone calling service people. In early August the mercury inched up again, then shot into the mid-90s. The sun beat down, the flowers wilted. The neighborhood pool water warmed to bathtub temperature. I had seen Five Star Heating and Air Conditioning on a nearby street. I looked them up and dialed.

Jason, the technician, was at the house the next day. When he finished his inspection we sat in the living room perspiring. “I can’t in good conscience try to fix the system,” he said. “Your condenser isn’t compatible with the evaporator coil on the inside unit. They use different coolants. The one in the condenser is obsolete. Someone did a bad job here.”

I showed him a 2017 invoice for a “2,000-pound AC unit” from a sole proprietor we had found in a kitchen drawer when we moved in. Jason looked at it. “I never heard of this guy,” he said. “This was a ripoff.”

We pieced together the story. The previous homeowner, an elderly widow, had moved to a nursing home about four years ago. The house sat unoccupied through those years. A nephew took care of the yardwork and presumably other maintenance. When the AC failed he, or someone, hired the sole proprietor to make a minimal, low-cost fix. He installed a condenser not compatible with the rest of the system and added the wrong coolant. The system never worked.

“You need a whole new system, condenser, evaporator coil, coolant. The furnace is part of it. We can do that for you. Our ‘comfort adviser’ can discuss it with you if you’re interested.”

An hour later Devin, the “comfort adviser,” rang the doorbell. He was a foot taller than Jason but crawled into the attic to look at the unit. He echoed Jason’s verdict. “The system can’t be fixed,” he said. “We can do all the work next Friday. Two options, one is $9,600, the other is $8,500.” Sandy jumped in. “We’ll get the cheaper one. Is there a senior discount?” she asked. “I can take off five percent,” Devin said. We said OK. I handed him my credit card.

The days grew hotter through the week we waited for the Five Star crew. The temperature inside rose to 90F. Some days I took three showers. Kyle and Ed arrived at 8:00 AM Friday. They disconnected the old system, dragged it out and threw it in their truck, and hauled in the shiny new coils box and furnace. The equally shiny new condenser went around the back.

Through the day they worked in the backyard and the attic, hammering, soldering, running wiring, while guzzling ice water. I cringed to think of the sauna-like heat of the attic. Around 6:00 PM, while we waited, hoping nothing went wrong, they switched on the new system. We felt a thrill of rushing, chilling air. They climbed down from the attic, drenched and dripping. Kyle showed us how to use the newfangled digital thermostat with the glow-in-the-dark symbology. We shook hands, they ran for their air-conditioned truck.

The next day I dug out our homebuyer’s inspection report. “The HVAC system is aged and will need to be replaced within five years,” the inspector had written. “It should be checked by a certified contractor.” We didn’t quite get five years. We didn’t get five months. Well, that’s over, I told myself. I took a deep, cool breath.  

August 19, 2021

School buses are back on the roads of neighborhoods all over America. Aboard are many of America’s roughly 35 million elementary schoolchildren under 12, who are not vaccinated against covid-19. They crowd together in school corridors, classrooms, and cafeterias. In eleven states and the District of Columbia they’re wearing masks because those states either require masks in schools or allow local school boards to require them, complying with guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Legislatures in seven states have prohibited mandates. Florida and South Carolina have threatened to withhold state funding from school boards that try to require masks. Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson signed a law banning schools from requiring masks. As covid ran rampant through the state he said he regretted signing it and asked the legislators to rescind the no-mandate law. They refused.

On August 3, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, discussing the dangers of the covid delta variant, said, “It’s clear that this variant is capable of causing serious illness in children. Anyone that says you don’t have to worry about it if you are a young, healthy person, there are many counter examples.

“You do need to think about it and that’s the reason why the recommendations are, for kids under 12, that they avoid being in places where they might get infected, which means recommendations of mask-wearing in schools and at home.” He later clarified his comments, saying that it’s not necessary to wear masks at home.

Collins, M.D., Ph.D., has served as NIH director since 2009, the only Presidentially appointed director to serve in more than one administration. From 1993 to 2008 he was director of NIH’s National Genome Research Institute.

In South Carolina, Dr. Hunter Moore of the Children’s Medical Center of Greenville obtained signatures of more than 1,000 physicians on a petition urging Governor Henry McMaster to rescind the state ban on mask mandates in schools. Moore said that “the most recent data for South Carolina shows the rate of daily cases is over 2,000 over the past week. These are the highest numbers we have seen since February 2021, and it is not reaching a plateau but is increasing at an alarming rate.

“With school starting in South Carolina this week and next and the rate of spread of the delta variant among the unvaccinated population, we have every reason to expect the case rate to explode in the coming weeks.”

On August 17 the Florida State Board of Education announced that the Broward and Alachua school districts could face financial penalties for violating a state law that bans schools from mandating masks. The Board said it would investigate and the districts would be “possibly punished,” according to The Washington Post, for failing to comply with the law.

At an emergency board hearing, Nikki Fried, state Agriculture Commissioner and Democratic candidate for governor said, “shame on all of you. How embarrassing that you may be more afraid of the governor than you are [concerned about] the lives of our children and teachers who already are getting sick and dying in record numbers.”

Meanwhile, the Post reported that Hillsborough County Public Schools, which includes Tampa, said that 8,400 students and 307 staff members are in isolation because of a positive test or in quarantine.

I stopped at the YMCA in Taylors, S.C., and watched a crowd of young kids file out of their daycare. None wore masks. I asked the college girl in charge about masks. “No, they don’t wear them,” she said. “We follow Greenville County policy. But they’re an option.”

South Carolina’s McMaster, rejecting the physicians’ petition, offered that “parents should be the ones who decide whether their children should wear masks. Parents know their children. They know what’s good for them. Common sense is the best way to fight the virus, not shutdowns or mandates. National covid experts, he said, are “exaggerating and engaging in hyperbole and unnecessarily alarming people.”

He reiterated his position that “mandating masks is not the answer. Personal responsibility is the answer, common sense is the answer, and we have an abundance of both in South Carolina.”

McMasters’ idea is that “personal responsibility” is a higher priority than schoolchildren’s safety. The state’s covid statistics cited by Dr. Moore show the dark consequences of the no-mask posturing.

A few days ago Collins said, “I do believe that [vaccine] mandates make a difference. … How did we get here? We’re incredibly polarized about politics, we really don’t need to be polarized about a virus that’s killing people. We ought to be doing everything we can to save lives. And that means get the vaccine. And that means wear a mask when you’re indoors in a crowded space. And if you’re unvaccinated, wear it all the time. … This is not a political statement or an invasion of your liberties. … We know that kids under 12 are likely to get infected, and if we don’t have masks in schools, this virus will spread more widely.”

August 16, 2021

Coastal North Carolina is a good hike from Greenville S.C., no matter how you plot it. Typically that’s I-26 to I-20 in South Carolina, then I-95, the east coast’s north-south thoroughfare, to “future” I-74, now U.S. 74 when you cross the state line, all the way to Wilmington. We have friends there we had not seen in five years.

The interstates, hard to tell apart anywhere, are especially monotonous along this stretch. The piedmont countryside levels off in a blur of lush green scrub growth on both sides through small towns until Florence. Squarely on the state line is South of the Border, the massive Mexican-themed amusement park/fast-food stop/fireworks market that, depending on your taste, may be only a massive eyesore. Why, you wonder, does it exist right here?

Wilmington was an important Confederate port, a point of export for Southern cotton and tobacco to Europe and import of weapons and soft and durable goods that supported the rebel armies in the field. The ship route up the Cape Fear River was guarded by Fort Fisher, the largest of a series of fortifications. After multiple attempts Union troops captured the fort in January 1865.

The Wilmington to Southport peninsula, created by the fast-flowing Cape Fear, has become a retirement destination for thousands of Yankees looking for a milder but not-quite tropical climate. The flat terrain and thousands of acres of pine forests and wetlands is a northern marker of the swampy Southeast coast down to Florida. The major artery, U.S. 17, once a lonely rural road, still cuts through swamps but now passes new gated golf communities, stripmalls, Walmarts, and shooting ranges.

The visit was a kind of mission, as they tend to be lately. We reunited with four friends, two couples who had relocated from Virginia fifteen or twenty years ago. The initial connection then was our children, the community swim club, daycare, and elementary and high school. The kids grew up and scattered to college, jobs, other states. We met over the years for weddings. They were near Wilmington, we were still stuck in Virginia, we traveled, gladly. Now the conversations are poignant updates: the new community, the kids, and that perennial favorite, the health and medical situation—the aches and pains report. I started the weekend Friday with another CT scan, my twelfth. But we all have something to contribute.

We dodged monsoon-like rain to visit Wrightsville Beach and looked out at the boiling gray surf. The beach area resembles shore areas everywhere: a boardwalk separating the sand from the casual restaurants and bars, the tattoo joints, the souvenir shops. We said hello to a staff person from the local chapter of Life Rolls On, a nationwide charity that uses surfing to inspire persons with disabilities. When the rain let up dozens of volunteers in colorful shirts carried their clients to the water on surfboards and helped them catch the fast-moving waves.

Southport, maybe 30 miles south of Wilmington, is an old port town at the mouth of the Cape Fear where the river meets the Intracoastal Waterway. Bay Street is lined by stately antebellum homes with a majestic view of the river and Battery and Bald Head Islands, which I guessed offer some protection from hurricanes. We walked along the rocky shore and looked out at the wide river. Powerboats and ferries plowed by through the calm waters. A giant oil tanker appeared at the mouth of the river and turned sharply north toward the Port of Wilmington. We checked the lively restaurant scene at the end of Brunswick Street. Afterward we walked on the beach. Volunteers had marked sea-turtle nests, doing what they can to protect turtle eggs and miniature turtles as they hatch. We watched the gentle surf roll in. The air was warm and soothing as the bright, fiery red sun set through a hazy sky.

Not far from downtown is St. James, once part of Southport, now incorporated, and like the rest of the peninsula home to a large contingent of Northerners who decided to pack up and move to a place near the water without tramping a thousand or more miles to Florida or the tourist-heavy beach towns of Myrtle Beach or Hilton Head, S.C. We admired the beautiful homes and careful planning. Settling in St. James, like anywhere on the Atlantic Coast means a commitment to seashore life. The beach and marina are there, along with the golf and tennis, which is everywhere in these places, for those who like those things.

Our friends who used to run on mountain trails in northern Virginia tells us you can’t find that. At St. James you can stroll, you can jog, you can go to the fitness centers and take yoga. You look around—you see houses, grass, trees, and dark ponds where alligators live.

We drove home, through what seemed like the daily hurricane-like cloudbursts. The rain came down sideways as we crawled back along U.S. 74, heading for the Upstate, with its gentle view of the southern fringe of the Blue Ridge. We talked, Sandy and I, for the hundredth time about why we landed there instead of on the seacoast. We like the crash of the surf, the warm breath of sea air, the thrill of the sunrise on the Eastern shore. But we’re nestled at the pointed end of pie-shaped South Carolina, near the mountains, the crashing waterfalls, the rocky trails, the quiet forests. We can drive to the beach.

August 9, 2021

My first couple of trips to Pittsburgh were in-and-outs. Twenty years ago I went with our son Michael on a college visit to Carnegie Mellon University during his senior year. It was January, mild at home in Virginia, we didn’t bring warm coats. In Pittsburgh we found a snowstorm and single-digit temperatures. He dropped CMU from his list.

Ten years later, in the dregs of December, I dropped off my daughter Laura, who moved there for a new job. We unloaded her gear in her rented place. I then scrambled back onto I-376 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike to escape an oncoming blizzard. The snow was piling up as I got out.

Eleven months later, in icy January, we went back for a weekend to see her, she showed us around. We visited the Strip District and waited in a long line at a famous deli to buy cheese. Crowds of local people lumbered around in their parkas. The scene recalled for me the flaring streets of James Joyce’s Dublin. We climbed Duquesne Heights for the spectacular, panoramic view of downtown, set off by the fast-flowing, slate-gray Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers. That was when she told us she was taking a job in California. When we left for home the next morning the thermometer was at -10F.

Laura moved back to Pittsburgh a while ago. She’s helping to implement a program called MovePGH, run by the Pittsburgh Mobility Collective, a public-private collaboration, the first in the country to offer public transportation with a few keystrokes on a cellphone.

Last weekend we drove up. Coming from the south (see August 2 post), you follow I-79 to I-376 through old industrial districts. Suddenly the highway runs onto the Fort Pitt Bridge, one of the city’s famous yellow bridges, and the downtown skyline bursts into view.

We stayed near downtown on Forbes Avenue, the wide thoroughfare past the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, but spent our time in Shadyside. It’s a place be in Pittsburgh for folks, young and old, who like a lively pace, a big-city restaurant and retail scene. Shadyside is one of the city’s many livable neighborhoods. Oakland is intensely urban, anchored by hospitals and universities. Squirrel Hill is residential and cosmopolitan, home to a large Jewish community, and once the home of Fred Rogers—it’s the real Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.

The Strip, in an old factory district just north of downtown, is packed with bistro-type restaurants and ethnic food shops nearly always crowded with locals and tourists.

Shadyside, like other Pittsburgh neighborhoods, helps tell a story of Pittsburgh. The city was built by the coal, coke, and steel industries. Generations ago the night sky above the mills glowed red, the air was gray with soot that sickened people and shortened lives. Around the 1950s the heavy industry economy went into a long decline. The wage-earning factory and mill employees endured hardship. The city lost population.

U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Alcoa, and PPG Industries, among dozens of other big-metals companies, all still have work in the region, but the big mills shut down. Over time the skies cleared. In recent decades healthcare institutions and technology businesses came to the city, attracted by the high-tech base at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. Educated young people moved into the renovated old urban neighborhoods. Today, on Walnut Street in Shadyside, restaurant patrons relax at sidewalk tables. Up and down the street are William Sonoma, Gap, Apple, J. Crew, Banana Republic, others.

We went for a little jog Saturday morning. We passed the many facilities of the U-Pitt Medical Center or UPMC, which dominates the area. We walked early Sunday morning to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Fifth. The streets were quiet except for a few cyclists and runners. Hospital staff people, just off shifts, waited for buses. We passed the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, the soaring 42-story Cathedral of Learning, the huge Parthenon-knockoff Carnegie Institute.

Driving up Forbes and Fifth toward Shadyside, we got a look at the massive old homes of Pittsburgh’s elite. The city claims Andrew Carnegie, who funded the technical college that became Carnegie Mellon, named also after Pittsburgh native philanthropist Andrew Mellon. Another Pittsburgh original, H.J. Heinz, founder of Heinz Company, removed additives from ketchup and lobbied for food purity. Everyone knows about Andy Warhol and Gene Kelly. Dr. Jonas Salk founded the Virus Research Laboratory at UPMC. Henry Mancini and Rachel Carson grew up near the city.

We walked Shadyside’s narrow one-way streets, passing the impressive brick and stone houses set off by neat arrangements of roses, impatiens, and hydrangeas that spring from the green spaces. On Walnut Street shops were in the middle of a big sidewalk sale, offering an eclectic mix: books, odd pieces of landscape art, flowery shirts and dresses, costume jewelry. Passersby browsed and bought. It was a glorious, springlike day. Locals crowded into the bars and pubs where they could choose from 100 or more draft beers.

It won’t always be like this, I thought. The Pirates will shut down their season, the Flyers and Steelers (all in black and gold) will bring out the crowds. The snowbirds will head for Florida. Winter will bring the snow and the frigid temperatures. The town will button up, people will pile on layers. We’ve been to Pittsburgh in January. The air is frigid but crisp and clear, the snow crunches under your feet. The Shadyside folks probably will enjoy it.

Seasons fly by, life changes. Many of the younger people here, working, making friends, starting their lives, will get married, move to the suburbs, have families. We did see a few oldsters. I wondered about them. Maybe they spent their twenties and thirties here, then left to raise their kids. And now here they are, back in Shadyside.

August 2, 2021

“Some say if they flattened all of West Virginia it would be as big as Texas,” said the park ranger manning the visitors’ center at New River Gorge National Park, just north of Beckley, W.Va. That sounds about right.

I stared at the map of the Gorge environs on his desk. “It looks like all this area is wilderness,” I said. “Pretty much the whole state is forest,” he answered. He should know, he lives just down the road in Fayetteville.

We were driving to Pittsburgh to see our eldest daughter. The most direct route, really the only route, is straight up the spine of West Virginia. To avoid the scary construction chutes of I-85 we took I-26 through western North Carolina into the lonely southeastern corner of Tennessee, as rough and rocky as West Virginia. After passing Johnson City we merged onto I-81 into Virginia, then made a sharp left onto I-77 at Wytheville. The highway passes through two mountain tunnels to get you to Beckley. Then you’re on U.S. 19 for a short run to the Gorge.

It’s a spectacular, relatively new national park, authorized by President Carter in 1978. The gorge plunges 1,000 feet to the river. The single-span arch bridge supporting Route 19, completed in 1977, was the world’s highest until 2003. Visitors hike down (then back up) 180 steps to the observation platform, gawk at the view of the bridge and the river, from that height a tiny stream between the towering cliffs. In October the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce puts on “Bridge Day,” and opens the bridge to pedestrians, bungee jumpers, and parasail daredevils.

Years ago we visited the eastern sliver of West Virginia a half-dozen times for running events, then drove across the state in summer 2018 on our half-country road trip. This time we headed for Clarksburg, an old heavy-industry town of about 17,000 in the dead center of what’s called Mountaineer Country, the craggy, relentlessly forested northern half of the state. It’s the country the John Denver tune celebrates and the state advertises with its “Wild and Wonderful” license plates.

The state isn’t all stunning mountain vistas. Clarksburg, once home to glass works, foundries, machine shops, and coal production, was named a “National Small City of the Year” by the National League of Cities in 2011. On the heights along East Main Street we passed gorgeous old homes with wide porticos and soaring Ionic columns.

The boom has faded. Retail businesses have left for suburban malls. Downtown Clarksburg hints at the rest of the story of West Virginia, the story of rural and remote once-prosperous places: hollowed-out hulks of factories, boarded-up businesses, ramshackle houses and mobile homes. In late afternoon people sat on steps in front of overgrown yards and shambled along the dull city streets, recalling the sad statistics of poverty and unemployment and the curse of the worst opioid epidemic in the nation. In 2020, 1,045 West Virginians died of opioid overdoses, a 45 percent increase over 2019.

Clarksburg folks, though, are bearing up. The atmosphere was upbeat and boisterous at Parkette’s Family Restaurant, just off U.S. 50, up a steep hill (what else?) from the dark high-rises of downtown.

We studied the menu. Sandy ordered the chicken salad and soup. I wanted a sandwich and a side of green beans. The waitress scribbled something. Sandy got her salad. Another server stopped by and advised they were out of peas. Our waitress returned with the soup. “Sorry, we’re out of peas,” she said. “I asked for green beans,” I said. “Oh,” she answered. “Green beans can sound like peas,” I offered. She laughed. 

I asked my standard question at restaurants in new towns: “How long has this place been here?” She blinked. “A long time, 25 or 30 years, but someplace else before that. I don’t know, I’m not that old.” I looked down at the paper placemat, which announced Parkette’s had been in business more than 70 years.

The restaurant was busy with an everyday crowd, a mix of young and old, a few shaved heads, waist-length beards, and gray hair. It was midweek dinnertime at a no-frills place next to an auto dealership, a counter and a dozen booths and tables, that offered no-frills meals as a break from workday routine. I wondered if the folks sitting at Parkette’s has felt the impact of economic decline, the loss of businesses and jobs, livelihoods?

We left the next day. We passed through Bridgeport and Fairmont, just north of Clarksburg. The country then shifts, over miles, from mountains to rolling hills. Morgantown, near the Pennsylvania line, is home to WVU, the state university. We crossed deeper into what was once America’s heavy industry heartland.

Outside the Pennsylvania welcome center at Carmichael stands a somber marble monument to 37 men who died in the December 6, 1962 explosion in the Frosty Run shaft of the Rowena soft-coal mine that operated where the welcome center now stands. The victims’ names are engraved on its base. The men were 600 feet below the surface, the blast was felt two miles away. Their bodies were found four days later. The explosion occurred on the 55th anniversary of the 1907 mine explosion at Monangah, W.Va., near Fairmont, that killed 361 miners, the worst mine disaster in U.S. history.

Their descendants still gather at the memorials to remember. But the coal and heavy metals industries, for generations the economic heart and soul of this region, no longer exist there. The Frosty Run site now is surrounded by pastures, cornfields, and woods, pretty and green. Cities, towns, and families suffered, some still suffer. But West Virginia and Pennsylvania have moved on. We read the inscription, looked at the countryside, and headed north.