One of the local independent TV stations — what we called ‘a UHF channel’ back in the d-iz-ay of analog broadcast — is showing ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes from the mid-1980’s every night this summer. I watch it because I’m always usually still awake at 11:30pm finishing small domestic tasks to create an illusion that, when my husband gets up for work in the morning, I run a clean and orderly household. (Or, you know, maybe I’m knitting or eating ice cream. Don’t you judge me.) A few weeks ago, I caught a Wes Craven-directed episode called “A Little Peace and Quiet” that scared the crap out of me as much as when I first saw it in 1985. Without getting too spoiler-y, it ended in nuclear war, which was the childhood bogeyman of that time.
Okay…maybe “bogeyman” isn’t the right word to describe it, because a bogeyman is supposed to be not at all real and therefore one is silly and childish to believe otherwise. Still, though? I remember learning in elementary school what to do in case the Soviets won the game of chicken with Reagan and dropped “the bomb” on us. If you’re at ground zero, no worries because you’re instant ghost. If you’re anywhere from two to 200 miles from the site, there is a list of precautions and survival tactics that you can take. I was suspicious of said instructions as they didn’t seem to vary proportionately to one’s proximity to The Bomb. This led me to a conclusion that it was all just baloney being fed to us by a government that didn’t want citizens to know that if you survived nuclear war, you were basically fucked.
This smarty-pantsedness did not help to ease my worry, as you can imagine.
I know every generation has Its Thing. Children in the Stone Age probably cowered under their pet dinosaurs, terrified of a comet that may or may not hurl itself Earthward and wipe out their civilization (such that it was). I’m sure there’s a reason behind those old maps having sea-monsters drawn on them. Duck-and-cover. Climate change and/or global warming. Et cetera.
Except, these kids today. I would love to dismiss the whippersnappers’ fear of impending climate change with, “Back in my day, we were all scared to death we were gonna have to live in a post-nuclear apocalypse, but you know what? It never happened. Now go run along and play with your Pokemons.” Only, this is no bogeyman. I also doubt that the US being run by a notorious climate-denier — despite all scientific proof to the contrary –gives youth any confidence that their fears won’t come true.
I have over three decades’ worth of paper journals, boxes of vacation photos, and, clouding around the blogosphere, roughly 20 years of somewhat regular digital records. That might not qualify as any fancy book-learnin’ meteorology or Earth science edumacation, but it does give me some archival cred. It really isn’t much of a stretch for me to find examples of how quickly climate change has happened over the insignificant micro-speck of time I’ve been around.
In the mid-1990s, my husband clubbed me over the head and dragged me by the hair into the backwoods of Maine to meet his parents. (Alright, it wasn’t as bad as all that. I was just reluctant to go into nature because I was afraid when I stepped off of the plane in my stacked heels I’d totter into a spiderweb or a nest of deer ticks or some other rustic pitfall.) I distinctly remember the absence of air conditioners – nay, the absence of a need for air conditioners – during our July visit to their farm-house. On the morning DH and I left, my late father-in-law lit the wood stove because it was “only” 45 degrees.
By the time my mother-in-law sold the homestead in 2016? There were window units in all the major living and sleeping areas.
When I look back at my narratives from the past 15 or so years, I find an increase in the number of my complaints about heat events in and around Chicago. I was going to detail what happened and when, but without proof it’d all be anecdotal and here-say, and there’s already enough of that noise here. So I held my general timeline up against NOAA weather data, but like I said I’m no scientist and I got a headache trying to account for factors like living under a hot tar roof or committing to work a July fundraiser dressed as Scary Goth Poetess or being seven months pregnant and I gave up. I would be negligent, however, if I didn’t mention the summer of 1995 heat wave. While not the hottest wave in Chicago history — summer of 1955 had it beat by a few hundredths of a degree — it was the worst one since I’ve been here. At the time, I was living in a third-floor apartment with no AC, intermittent power failures and, thanks to the neighborhood kids prying open every hydrant west of Damen Ave., no running water. I would prowl the streets at night in search of a refreshing beverage, under the glow of a foul bank marquis displaying temps in the 90s well after sundown. My roomie at the time had wisely split to her partner’s climate-controlled apartment, leaving me to weep on the back porch over the irony of how much easier it was to fall asleep at my desk in an icy-cold Loop high-rise office than my own apartment.
Then I’d dry my eyes and haul my disgusting cat Chicken out with me so I could rub him down with ice cubes. It helped remove excess fur and cool his blubber. I made the mistake of relating this to another admin at my job, within earshot of one of the higher-ups. Oh, he was just tickled pink by my povertous lifestyle:
“Ha! Ha! Ha! No, really,” he said. “You have to put ice cubes on your cat? Har har har!”
I glared at him crossly through my hideous eye-bags. “Yes. He’s overweight and I don’t have air conditioning.”
“Hoo hoo hoo! I sit in the comfort of my parents’ meat locker in Northbrook, sipping Diet Coke and masturbating to ESPN! You pet your cat with ice cubes and sleep on a bed made of straw!” He walked off, still laughing audibly. “Ha ha ha ho ho!”
Laugh all you want, ass-butt, but you are going DOWN, I’d think while giving him several evil eyes. Sure enough, he left to take a gig as some big swinging business dick at Arthur Andersen, and we all KNOW what happened to them.
But I digress. Sorry, I am a sucker for schadenfreude.
This illustration does, in its own little way, show how much easier it is for those with resources to survive potentially fatal elements — 739 Chicago residents died over the course of 1995’s five-day heat wave — in relative comfort. It also shows that it’s possible to get to the other side of a heat wave alive without first-world basics such as electricity and water that comes out of a spigot when you turn the knob with the “C” on it.
But not always. Bear in mind that most of the above-mentioned fatalities were elderly and poor.
So, what about when global warming progresses and/or becomes more pervasive? It stands to make resources like clean water, food and shelter mighty scarce. If and (I hope not, but let’s be realistic here) when that comes to pass, I’ve no doubt in my mind that we will see the same thing play out at-large in society. Those with the most will struggle the least, leaving chumps like you and me to sweat it out with the rest of the hoi palloi.
Ka-blooey!
Discount Inferno! 