Heat Remedy #2

Contemplate the weather. Drift with the season.

We've had two summers in one. At the start of June the cool temperatures and afternoon storms swooping down over the Northwest reminded me of summers in Germany: fragrant, rain-freshened, leafy and inspiring you to jaunt into the hills or follow the parks along the river.

Then with the force of a sledgehammer striking an anvil, one-hundred degree heat bludgeoned the valley and every urge was a desert instinct to hunker in the shaded hammock and watch the foothills flare in the sun. Read some Pavese, or Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, or Calvin and Hobbes when Ada comes trotting up the hill and dives in beside me carrying her favorite book. Books, iced drinks, stories of past summers wading into the river as a boy to catch snakes and crawdads or a bucking ride on a plywood river board tethered to a tree trunk. And naps, of course. Anything to compliment our oasis of piled shadows under the lilac and maple, our languid fantasy that the hammock is a boat adrift on thin clouds in a weltering sky. Eleven consecutive days of one-hundred-plus highs (one day reached 110) matched the record set in the early 2000's.

Then the surprise of a couple more weeks of pleasant eighties and afternoon clouds bulking the stratosphere and evenings tussled with rain or wind storms. The dewey grassy smell of early mornings just before the sun ignites the treetops. The reward of a bicycle ride through slatted shadows of the neighborhood, or an evening walk up Hull's Gulch among the sage and bitter brush, the kestlings roving above the locust groves.

But now a heat wave has hunkered in again, with the real start of fire season. The sweet smoke of grass fires in the Owyhees curdles the air and ruddies the sunsets. We have no choice but to float the Boise River. We join our friends Nick and Hollis and their two young girls in renting a raft and riding the high water under leafy willows, charging the ferocious class one rapids with the girls shouting "full speed ahead!"  We take out at eddies, picnic under the cottonwoods, watch rainbow trout nick the surface as they snatch insects in the evening light. The water is bracing cold but the girls count up their courage and hold their noses before jumping in to their necks.

We, all of us, count up our courage.  Monday will come with its work and trudging and cursing in the heat and smoke, but we savor our Sunday believing that the more we enjoy the pleasantries of life, the less its hardships have hold of us.  Like dipping your head in water before crossing a sunbaked field, we soak in these river days for sustenance.