Alien season

Summer is the season which always reminds me that, in a certain sense, I do not quite belong here.

This land is mine, but it is not the land of my ancestors.  I was born here, but my parents were not.  I come from millennia of adaptation to the cool and misty forests of northern Europe.  I am used to my land, the land where I was born and have lived my life, but every summer reminds me that I was not quite made for it.

The sunlight of summer never looks right.  The dazzling migraine glare sleets down over everything like an ash-dry and uncleansing shower, washing out subtleties of color, turning shadows into blank volumes of impenetrable darkness by sheer contrast.  Even through dark glasses it is harsh and bleary, an alien light.  It is not the light my eyes were made to see with.

The heat of summer is -- endurable.  I tolerate the sweating, the need to minimize exertion, the daily ritual of opening my windows during the coolness of night and closing them when the Sun comes up.  A hundred strategies to minimize discomfort do not add up to comfort.

I exist by artifice.  Full-body clothing protects my northern-European skin from the scarring, chromosome-twisting ultraviolet fire which invisibly drenches me.  In public buildings, air conditioning fills the sealed structure with an imitation of the old continent's cooler and gentler air so that I and others like me can be comfortable.  Even cars are similarly equipped.  It is my privilege as a tool-using ape to enclose myself in small capsules of the environment I prefer, keeping at bay the environment that prevails.

There is nothing wrong with using artifacts to ward off the effects of uncomfortable surroundings.  Europe itself could not have been settled by human beings in the first place if they had not invented clothes and mastered fire.  The difference is one of degree.

This is all the more true in the hotter parts of our land.  I am reliably informed that in Texas it is impossible to find any type of residential or office space, however cheap, which does not have air conditioning.  Beneath downtown Dallas there is a complex of large air-conditioned tunnels -- well-lit and attractive and with abundant shopping -- which connects, I believe, about fifty of the central city's most important buildings.  During the summer it is possible to walk all over downtown Dallas without ever emerging into the actual heat of the surface, even momentarily.  It is like an enclosed settlement on another world.

Because Portland's summer is less harsh, we here have not gone to such lengths to insulate ourselves from it.  And so once again I prepare to live through the months of the alien season, awaiting the day when the cool and clouds return and my land once again feels like the distant land which stamped its character on my genes, even though I -- being American born -- could never call it home.