Heat, But No Dust

Somehow, we have moved from May, when we one and all up here in the Northwest complained extensively about how cold it was this spring, barely making it to the mid-50’s during the day, to June, when the first week of the month has stunned us with 80+ degree temperatures. In the 16 years we have been up here, it has never been this hot in June, and most years it has never been this hot at all, let alone in June. The mosquitoes haven't even had time to breed.

Two weeks away from the Point Roberts garden, almost all of it at least pretty warm and relentlessly sunny, has made the garden seem more like a jungle with sudden growth and bloom. Things that grow next to one another but don’t usually bloom together are now making some wondrous visual pairings. The rhododendrons and columbines do normally bloom together, but not in June. That usually happens in May. And they usually last awhile, but in this heat they are fading quickly.

When I lived in the South Pacific, on the island of Yap, I tried to grow things I knew how to grow. I’d get people to send me some vegetable seeds and I’d plant them on Monday. By Wednesday, they had germinated; by Friday, they were well on their way to getting buds; by Sunday, they were finished. Well, that’s something of an exaggeration, but it was a very short (and unproductive) season from start to finish, and that is sort of what this feels like. Plants doing nothing, then blooming and ending bloom very quickly.

Everyone says, ‘If this is June, what is August going to be like?’ Clearly, the weather is providing us with an enormous conversation this year. I was reading about geoengineering the other day (fancy ways to fool around with the earth and/or its atmosphere in order intentionally to alter the climate). Maybe this weather is just one more project out of DARPA on behalf of Customs and Border Protection whose purpose (i.e., the project) is to distract us. If so, it's working: we're pretty distracted.