When summer is still it is still. This riverbank echoed with the crowds that would have packed it on another day, their presence betrayed by the networks of trails that spider-webbed over exposed roots down the eroded slopes to the water. But even without the trails and here and there plastic cups and beer bottles the clean smoothness of the rock bank—perfect for picnics and wading and sun lounging—would have conjured the memory of frolicking children and their parents, gaggles of teens and scattered people fishing regardless of the nearby town. The river arrived here out of a gorge—several hundred feet of frothing, churning water between two walls of rock—dumping out into a pool that expanded both out to the widened banks and away downstream. The frothing water dropped out of the last chute and died in all that space.
But the day was hot and muggy and midweek and with no people the pool was a place of immense stillness—all the more so after the gorge. Nothing is as still as a hot summer day. The humidity soaks up all the sound and dulls the senses until time itself contracts. Like the frothing water hitting the pool it slowed, expanding outward as if it might blot out yesterday and tomorrow until the now were just a blob with no edges. I could have lay down in the shade of a riverside birch and become another Rip Van Winkle. The water whispered to me, reaching out with grasping fingers, the whole walk back out.
I didn’t like hot weather when I was a kid because I didn’t like my body, and hot weather won’t let you forget that. I got through the early years by layering imagined worlds like protective blankets on top of my real one. Winter, full of emptiness, was so accommodating. Summer was full already, and in July and August’s moments of stillness and calm what rose to the surface were not magical worlds but my sticky armpits, scratches and bug bites on my legs and arms and the baking sun on my neck.
My earliest memory of summer—maybe my earliest memory—is lying in my own sweat on top of the sheets long past bed time, suffocating on the soupy night air of the Ohio River Valley as it oozed in black through the open window. It seemed that if I didn’t fall asleep the night would never pass and in those nights years went by—I was lost in an in between time. Only the unceasing blare of crickets and cicadas kept me tethered to the present. On lucky mornings, when the overnight temperature dropped into the low 70’s I’d awake in a state of calm, the heavy air and the roaring insects a distant memory. But it was the briefest of reprieves—the heat would be back before morning was gone.
I don’t hate my body anymore, I’ve claimed back a lot of the power summer had over me, but I still struggle with the constant presence of it all. What I can see now is that the eeriness of summer is the living in a constant teetering between the endless present and being lost to siren songs. One moment it is impossible to day dream, the next it is perilously easy. It is not a time for imagined worlds—here the force comes right out of the ground. There is strange power in growing things.
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