The Lost Innocence of WeatherBy Jane Holtz Kay Weather makes us sturdy weeds, says a friend. I love the heat, she says, the cold as much. And so do I. I am a partisan of the cruel climate that defines the fiber of New England. Weather hardiness has enabled us to spawn a culture, to forage afield, to live in any place and climate. New England weather gives us the vagaries and violence that make a four-season society. Compared to the weather-deprived Sunbelt or New West, those scant two-climate places-"a.c. and no a.c.," as a writer put it in the Arizona Republic. Boston has weather.
Weather, weather, weather. Weather defined in all its multifariousness heightens our architecture. It shadows and sunlights and three-dimensionalizes the buildings and environs bequeathed by history. In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez writes of how shifting weather systems relieve "the apparent monotony of the land." How much more so here, where the richness of the seasons heightens the polyglot Boston building stones and pocket gardens. Weather defines our very culture. In my childhood, any school that fancied itself literate mandated reading that reflection on weather's intimacy with place: The Education of Henry Adams. Adams' text, assigned as regularly as The Rise Of Silas Lapham, described our character seasonally. His New England, defined and divided by its extremes of hot and cold, its licentious summer and Puritan winter, is surely the only autobiography so besotted by weather. And, yet, not all of us gloat about the weather portrayed in the classic Gloucester fisherman statue (or his rowdier heirs, the habitu_s of the neighborhood bar in The Perfect Storm). Many of us are, in fact, weather wimps. In the spirit of the everybody-talks-about-the-weather-but-nobody-does-anything-about-it phrase, we are climate-phobes. My own family stands at the hub of this tribe of talkers. In Manhattan, my daughter tells me, "Not a day goes by that I don't hear about the difference in Boston and New York weather," she says. I don't need to watch the Weather Channel to know what's going on up and down the coast." In fact, she is a fourth-generation New England weather recipient, nurtured by the long cord of my weather-centric family's telephone. Weather watchers, weather reporters, weather communicators all, the family tradition was started by my grandfather some eighty years ago during his early days as one of New England's first traveling salesmen. Ominous weather shadowed his road trips; and later, house-bound but constant, he kept the weather-wire open, informing family members of the news (most often bad). By then, the onset of Parkinson's had given him physiological reasons to fear the whip and shifts of this climate and send him ringing the alarm for the rest of us. He was an amateur hero in a weather broadcasting occupation mightily expanded and improved these days. Or, so it would seem now that the newspaper maps show us the national weather in all its pastel efflorescence and the perpetual lip-motion television meteorologists go on at all hours with their details and verities. And yet, I react more dubiously to their climate renderings these days than to my family's. Who doesn't? As the weather folks' readings get more advanced, their new statistics and satellite-bred graphs blithely-inevitably-skip the implications of what the ordinary environmentally-conscious perceive: that the climate is changing, the globe suffering its swings. It is this weather shift with its deeper uncertainties that renders their utterings minor and their daily warnings as ironic as treacherous. Erratic weather, record-breaking weather, weather warped by global warming is both literally and metaphorically chilling in its manifestations. Not the "chilling" solved by jackets and galoshes; not the "warming" alleviated by air conditioning. The old bundling up or dressing down, turning on the fan to "beat" the weather are irrelevant, even arcane, as we shudder at reports on the longest, the coldest, the wettest,the driest,the hottest,the fieriest weather and read of scientists going back, and back, to find matching records. Every day now, the broadcasts and papers tell us that their findings have, in fact, turned all of the planet into a changeable New England. Can we ever be innocent of weather again? Can we ever go back to our old comforts as climate change reports percolate news of the global "whip and shift?" How normal and nice all our old surges and swells seem by comparison. How quickly our benign thoughts about weather as natural and eternal change are replaced by a new perception that weather's fierce consequences are, in fact, man-made, and hardly benign. Global warming is caused by the same technology that enables us to predict the daily forecasts. All those emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons in support of a lifestyle that heats the atmosphere, ironically, enable the weatherman's journal to have access to a million glowing television tests. It is a seamless web in which my family's ministering forecasts and those of the professionals, too, become irrelevant and obsolete. As we float adrift in today's deeper meteorological mayhem, what can be done?
Are not all weather words futile in the end? Even literary weather words may no longer work now that the specter of holocaustical hot and cold looms. No more sunny days as simply metaphors. No more downpours as signs of everyday gloom. No more weather as mood, as romantic excuse or ruse ("Though the weather outside is frightful, the fire is so delightful.") No textual nuances. Even in all our fears and fidgets, who would have thought that our treasured weather words themselves would become obsolete or incomplete? Are these ponderings extreme? Perhaps. Yet, as I pine for the lost innocence of weather, I know that the consequences of climate can no longer be a social cliché, a conversational gambit, a family portrait, or character description for me. Weather's highs and lows, its winds and whistles will evoke fewer sentimental memories of my family history, fewer reminiscences of New England's well-weathered surroundings. No Proustian madeleines here. Gone is the notion that there can be a casual presumption of "climate control," which lies at the very root of the way we spread and shelter ourselves. That confidence is lost along with innocence in the unearthly, if not apocalyptic, dialogue of global warming and cooling. The arrogance, the unmitigated, human-centered arrogance, was to think it otherwise; to think that we had tamed the weather. To err was human, but to continue to do so is lethal. I will or won't find the word to describe a global "winter." We will or won't work to modify weather patterns. The human condition will or won't deteriorate, or, even, in the course of ages, disappear. Whatever happens, though, one thing I know: weather is no longer an amulet of memory, no longer an unadulterated nuisance, joke or joy. Written for the Winter, 2000 issue of Appalachia.
|
Listening to Dallasites bewail their heat (and descend into underground tunnels on days when a simple fan would cool the New Englander); hearing Phoenicians lament waiting in the sun for a bus, when we would cheerily (or at least silently) blister on, I dote on the diversity of weather that makes us strong. We alpha dogs of weather laugh at Washingtonians stuck in snow as we go about our ice-fishing in near-zero weather. We empty out of our subways for a Red Sox game traipsing confidently through a downpour that will surely bring out the tarpaulin and send us home.
As for me, I feel I cannot be a citizen of this planet, a writer on this environment, built and natural, without dealing with the sprawl and paving, the spewing of that carbon dioxide from our automobile tailpipes and industry smokestacks that produce global warming. Remember "nuclear winter," the words that roused a generation to the dangers of a planet laid waste by nuclear war? What are their peers to stir us to curtail the excretions and consumption that tax the planet today.