FILTHY DAYS

Photo: On one of my beach walks.

Today is a filthy day. I have always loved that Brit term for foggy, rainy, windy, chilly unpleasantness. I am not in England, and this isn't April. It is June in New England. The temperature is a bare 19 degrees Fahrenheit above freezing. This indeed a filthy day.

Saying our weather has been erratic this past year is an understatement. We had a warm and rainy winter until February. It seemed we were living in Seattle. With February came brutal snow storms and subfreezing temperatures. That harshness stayed on until March. To a degree, it hasn't really left. 

The optimists will rejoice at the relief we are experiencing from a years-long drought. I can get behind that somewhat. I love trees. The green hills beyond us here are beautiful this year. The foliage is so thick that no human habitation is visible beneath. If there weren't another 200 units of housing in the immediate foreground, I could imagine myself to be in the foothills of the Berkshires. 

I am not optimistic about this weather. I'll explain. A decade ago I lived on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in a nearby small city. It was a time of more vigorous discussion about climate change in media. The deniers were still quite vocal, emboldened by George W. Bush, a POTUS without much of an IQ but plenty of provenance with the petrochemical juggernaut. I took nearly daily walks at the beach. On my route, an old set of stairs descended to the beach from the walkway. 

The ocean tides grew visibly higher in my five years of taking those walks. The tide levels gradually obscured the entire beach at the base of the stairs and crept over the bottom two stairs. I didn't need this measure to convince me of the severity of ocean rise. My house, built in the 1940's on an island between a river estuary and a salt marsh, had a basement. During the five years there, the ground water from extraordinary tides and river flows due to heavy rains began occasionally to rise up into my basement. I grumbled as I listened to deniers of climate change on my kitchen radio while my sump pump hummed on in my basement.

Filthy days were common in the Spring on Cape Cod when I was a youngster. I actually relished them. I enjoyed walking down deserted roads through empty neighborhoods by the beach. Lashing rain seemed a minor inconvenience in balance with that profound solitude, punctuated by loud cries of blue jays in the swaying pines. Those soggy days were not associated with impending natural disaster. They were simply pleasant diversions from the crisp blue skies of sunnier days.