SUNSTRUCK
(06.26.97)
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BY
PETER KURTH
Your
sun at work!
"After
many a summer dies the swan," said the poet, but death from heat
prostration isn’t what this swan had in mind. Not before the end of June,
anyway. Please -- I’m begging you.
How
did the legend ever get started that
In
the old days, it’s true, there wasn't a "festival" every weekend to
remind you what season it was. Believe it or not, you could walk the whole
length of town without passing a story-teller, or a pan-piper, or a vegetable
cart selling tomatoes for three dollars apiece, because they've been bred in
somebody's "hydroponic" greenhouse with a
Q-tip.
No
-- we knew it was summer on account of the heat. And the humidity. And the
poison ivy. And the flies. When you got up in the morning in those days and
realized how hot it was, you either went swimming or shot yourself, one or the
other. And with good reason. Vermont is the hottest cold spot in the nation,
"the Sahara of the North," as a friend of mine called it after moving
here from Washington, D. C. in search of relief. Not finding any, he quickly
died, but not before he’d persuaded me to continue his mission.
"Tell
Vermonters the truth," he groaned from his bed. "Tell them they’ve
been lied to. It’s an inferno out there!"
I
should confess that I come from a long line of summer-haters. My mother starts
worrying that summer is on the way before her Christmas tree comes down, and my
sister, noted photographer Gillian Randall, would rather suffer two Januaries
back to back than endure July in any form. This won't surprise anyone who
thinks we're "negative" to begin with, including the editors of this
newspaper, who forbade me to say a word against summer until they'd put their
"Summer Preview" issue safely to bed. They've got their advertisers
to think about, and besides, like most Americans, they've been brainwashed into
thinking that, so long as the sun is shining, there can’t be anything wrong. It
could be 100 degrees in the shade; they could be crawling on their bellies
covered with ants, clawing the dirt in front of them in a desperate search for
water, and still they'd be gasping, "Isn’t it beautiful? Look, the sun’s
out!"
Copyright
© Death Valley Chamber of Commerce
All
right, so I have some issues with this. I was deeply wounded as a child. Born
at the end of July, I never got to celebrate my birthday in school like
everyone else. All the other kids got parties and presents and favors from the
teachers, while I got tortured by spunky gals with volleyballs who thought summer
camp was what God intended for children all along.
Yes,
I was made to feel "less than" because I wanted to stay home in the
summer and read books. I didn’t like sand in my ears or bugs up my nose. I
thought there must be something better than sharing a tent with spiders and
raccoons and six boys who thought "snot" was the funniest word in the
English language. If people knew how disgusting 11-year-old boys really are,
they’d drown them at birth. In fact, if I were complaining about anything except
summer I could start a 12-Step group and probably sue my parents for damages.
As
it is, I'm stuck with the only remaining shame-based, taboo illness in the
nation. You might as well say that you don't like to dance as express a desire
for rain. Either way, people won't believe you. That is, they don't think it's
possible. They can't conceive of it. They moan about the winters -- how long
they are and how cold it is and how depressed they've been
because they don't get any sunlight. There's even a medical diagnosis for this
condition: Seasonal Affective Disorder, abbreviated, in case you didn't get it,
to S.A.D.
But
just try telling someone that you've got Summer-Unilateral Inferno Crumpling in
the Dust and Languishing Syndrome (S.U.I.C.I.D.A.L.S.)
and see how far you get. "Oh, come on," they'll say. "You just
need to get outdoors!"
Maybe
it was the baseball games that did it. My father was a farm league coach --
farm league comes just before little league, unless they've outlawed it -- and
I played on the team for five traumatizing, character-warping years. It was
beyond the capacity of anyone to understand that I didn’t like baseball, that I
never would like baseball, and that no amount of practice and public
humiliation was going to make me any better at it. How I longed for one of
those handsome, sensitive coaches who’d put his arm around my shoulder and say,
"Well, let’s find out what you’re really good at, Pete, and concentrate on
that!"
On
second thought -- don’t go there. When I was 14, I was finally rescued by the
local Shakespeare festival, which took little boys like me under its wing if it
needed a page or a shepherd or a prince to be smothered in the Tower. The
Shakespeare festival also had the advantage of being held indoors, in a
comfortably air-conditioned space. I got to dress in a codpiece and tights, and
tripped around the maypole every summer after that, singing, "
Cuckoo
is right. Next case.
"No
people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election
on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument
[of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can
depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything
traditionally American. And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they call
him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal,
democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
-- Dorothy Thompson, 1935