Ode to an Odd Summer
By Jessica Shepherd
Given everything going on in the lower 48 states, I’m grateful for our cooler-than-average summer. Grateful to live in that one small crescent of land and sea spared from the ravages of climate change. Still, our late spring and chilly summer brought their own troubling implications.
Despite the gift of an Indian Summer, signs of fall abound. Daddy Long Legs greet me in the shower, crawl unbidden across the bed, and drop from the ceiling. Squealing my alarm, to husband Hal’s amusement, I fling them out the nearest window. They always invade the house when frost first bejewels the lawn, but they seem particularly numerous this year. Too, the squirrels are cutting spruce cones from the trees and dropping them in a noisy percussion onto the metal roof, which sets the dogs to barking. The cones accumulate on the deck throughout the day, but by the next morning, she has squirreled them into some underground cache, making ready for winter.
Enjoying days on end of El Nino-induced sunshine, we make the most of it by cutting wood, harvesting apples, and riding our bikes into town to pick up groceries and mail before stopping for chai tea at a local cafe. The warmth and sun are a surprise after a cold, rainy spring followed by a cool, drizzly summer. While the rest of North America broiled under an unrelenting heat dome, we pulled on jackets and wool caps to ward off wind and chill. I have a screen capture of a National Weather Service map produced in July showing the entire US in shades of red except for a tiny blue curve in southern-central Alaska marked “below normal.”
All summer, after nudging up the thermostat, we scanned the headlines. In Canada, thousands of fires have burned 64,000 square miles, with smoke blanketing the eastern and central US, impacting flights and driving people indoors away from the toxic air. Then Lahaina, Hawaii, a community about the size of the greater Homer area, burned, devastating that tight-knit community. I couldn’t help thinking, but by the grace of God, that could be our town.
We followed the news of Hurricane Idalia as it swirled above the shimmering 101-degree waters of the Pacific before slamming into Cedar Key, Florida, just 30 miles south of my brother’s double-wide. Folks there are still cleaning up after a six-foot storm surge. We’d already made plans to stay in this quaint artist community for Christmas, so we’ll see first-hand what the one-two punch of climate change and El Nino have done.
The last four months, including September, have broken global temperature records, with August exceeding the 1951 – 1980 average by 2.2 degrees, nudging us ever closer to that fateful 1.5-degree tipping point.
Even now, as we scrape frost off the windshield of a morning, it’s 102 in Tucson, where my granddaughter sits in her third-grade classroom. As termination dust (a colloquium for the first snowfall of the season) dusts the mountains across the bay like powdered sugar, record-breaking temperatures continue across the northeast corner of the US.
Given everything going on in the lower 48 states, I’m grateful for our cooler-than-average summer. Grateful to live in that one small crescent of land and sea spared from the ravages of climate change. Still, our late spring and chilly summer brought their own troubling implications.
At first, I didn’t think much of it when the trees were two weeks late leafing out, and the lawn didn’t need mowing until mid-June. But, come early July, when we typically look for the first fireweed blossoms to add their vibrant magenta to the landscape, there were no blooms. Throughout August, even on a drive up to Anchorage through a vast swath of recently burned forest that should be awash in hot pink flowers, the landscape was oddly vacant of color. This, in turn, meant fewer flowers for the bees and, thus, little honey to be had. Over a glass of mead from our locally sourced meadery, I learned that the owner had to import honey from Alberta for the first time ever, driving up costs and, subsequently, the price of the tasty cloudberry mead I savored. Conversely, the noxious pushky plants (our local name for cow parsnip) grew taller and denser than ever, towering over our heads and closing in on the running trails, much to Hal’s consternation.
Throughout much of Alaska, fish numbers were down for the third or fourth year in a row. Hal and I work with Native tribes up in the Norton Sound region, and they spoke in somber tones of empty drying racks and smokehouses. Here in Kachemak Bay, we use a setnet to catch silver salmon each August. As a family, we’re allowed 30 fish, and in prior years, we’ve filled the chest freezer with red, vacuum-packed fillets. This year, we caught just two fish. Two. Instead of salmon, our nets were caked with seaweed, torn up from the ocean floor by relentless wave action throughout the summer. Fortunately, we still have some salmon left from last year’s haul. While they’re not as good as fresh-caught, they’ll be fine in patties and salmon salad.
We don’t hunt, but I’ve also heard that moose numbers are down. At our local food pantry, where I volunteer, we depend on moose, either donated or acquired from the Department of Fish and Game when a moose is under legal size, to feed families facing food insecurity. This year, not a single moose has come in. Antidotally, my perky physical therapist told me her husband had seen no moose during his two-week hunting trip, but he did tally 20 bears!
And speaking of bears, they’re hungry this year. A big black bear has been frequenting compost piles in my neighborhood all week – something we’ve not seen in the dozen years we’ve lived here. With few salmon spawned out on the beach for them to eat and only a smattering of berries, they’re going into the winter season without the layer of fat they need.
In the garden, the carrots never grew longer than finger-sized, even though I planted them early and used heat tape to warm the soil. This spring, we scaled back the outdoor gardens from seven beds to four, which turned out to be a good thing. The cool-loving crops like broccoli, Magic Molly potatoes, and Brussel sprouts did fine, but the pumpkins I so pride myself on never got bigger than tennis balls. And don’t get me started on the slugs.
We did have some winners in the garden. The Tacoma strawberries in the high tunnel were abundant. And now, a month late, the raspberries are coming in plump and plentiful. After making a batch of jam, I’m freezing the rest for deserts and a few gallons of decadent holiday wine.
Despite the challenging growing season, like the squirrels and the Daddy Long Legs, we are ready for winter. The wood shed holds enough seasoned alder and spruce to keep us in warm fires. Onions dry in braids in a cool window. Potatoes cure atop newspapers under my dresser, and the big freezer outside is bulging with locally purchased poultry and pork, last year’s salmon, and jars of chutney and pesto. This feels like wealth to me. I worry about a future of ever-increasing temperatures, knowing that our hamlet by the sea won’t be spared, but for now, I’ll embrace the allure of this sunny day.
Very nice images in your writing.