July storm

All times are present now

I feel lucky that I knew both my grandfathers. One of them, my father's father, was named Rex. 

Rex, in turn, certainly knew his grandfather William, who wrote a brief memoir in 1921. William, born in 1834, wrote, "My memory goes back over a long stretch of years. I remember when there were no matches. We started fire with our flint gun and tow; also when there was no telegraph; when there were no threshing machines." He wrote that he remembered using flails, sickles, and scythes. 

I can picture Rex, a clever, smiling, and sociable man, quite easily. I can imagine talking to him now about William, and having him tell me just what his grandfather was like. What I am trying to convey to you is that William's memories, typed and bound into a small volume that is sitting on my desk as I type today, are just a step beyond mine and Rex's. His time is not distant from ours.

I can also imagine trying to make plain the connection between all the machines built since then and the heat now wrapping around the earth, and telling Rex about this summer of extremes when the earth itself seems to be running a fever. He would be astonished, but he would understand. 

It seems as if we should all be writing our memories of the stretch of years we have been alive, as William did. In a few generations, our memories will be as remarkable as William's. "I remember when there were no matches," he writes, and my breath catches. How astounding. But we will write, "I remember when we spent summer days outside," and that will seem extraordinary.   

On Saturday, July 29, 2023 at about 5pm a sudden, violent storm hit Washington, DC, where I live now. It had been a very hot, humid day, and just before the crash of rain arrived the skies  around the house were grey and warm. Then cloudy wet winds drove sideways in all directions at once, and from behind the wall of windows where I stood it was if the house was going through a violent, chaotic car-wash. The trees whipped deeply side to side. There were cracks and howls around the house, as the wind rushed by. In a few minutes, the storm was over and the power was out for my house and for 200,000 people around me.

The dynamics of this "microburst" storm were simple: a cool, dry front ran into the extremely hot, extremely moist air sitting heavily above this region. The hot air rushed upward, sucked high by the difference between its low density and the arrival of cooler, higher-density, sinking air. Those differences were dramatic, making the updrafts of air very swift and the resulting cloud of moisture (formed when the air cooled and condensed) very tall. Inside that cloud, tiny water droplets banged into each other, forming larger droplets, and those larger droplets eventually became too heavy for the rising updrafts to keep aloft. A cloud became a sudden, smashing rainstorm, with rain cast down from a tall height.

Some of that rain evaporated before it hit the ground, cooling the hot air around it--which then itself became denser and cooler and sank (very swiftly) toward the earth. That was the wind, the downdraft, that hit the ground and spread horizontally in all directions, bringing down scores of trees within about five minutes over about 2.5 square miles. We were lucky. Microbursts can produce winds of up to 160 mph. This one was just 84 mph, accompanied by intense rainfall.

(That part I understand. I understand that the storm ended when the cooling effect of those downdrafts on the air underneath the cloud eventually reduced the strength of the updrafts and, finally, stopped warm air from moving upward. What I don't understand is why these dynamics produced a positively charged upper cloud and a negatively charged lower cloud and, eventually, thunder and lightning. But let's move on.)

The storm revealed how dependent every step of my life is on electricity. Most days of the week I stay inside most of the day, in air-conditioning. I know how fragile this structure is, and how dependent it is in turn on endless amounts of continued emissions, with something like 16% of the supply coming from renewable sources and 27% from nuclear (DC). It also revealed, yet again, that the human body has not evolved at the rate our climate has: like all humans, I am intensely uncomfortable when exposed to very hot, very humid conditions. 

But the deep significance of the storm is that DC was, on Saturday afternoon, essentially a tropical region. It was so hot and so humid here that crushing wind and rain, the worst in 11 years, suddenly crashed into the earth. We had a brief terrestrial hurricane, fueled by the hot earth instead of the ocean. 

Rex may have experienced storms like this in the tropics, but probably not in Philadelphia where he spent his adult life. William grew up in Ohio and Pennsylvania, working on farms before he became a doctor and then a dentist. I doubt he ever saw anything this abrupt. Even if they did experience a storm or two along these lines, they could not have imagined a summer of reading news stories about extreme weather events, day after day. Both of these men had a scientific bent and would have understood that many of these extreme events are authoritatively attributed to the increased heat required by machines.

I have been listening to "The Longest Journey," by E.M. Forster. It's from 1907, when both Rex and William were alive. Along the way, a woman falls in love with a farmer who explains agricultural concepts to her. As he talks, the earth becomes a living being in her mind. "Or, rather, a being with a living skin, capable of regeneration and the birth of life from life," Forster writes. She is delighted and inspired: "'So it goes on forever!' she cried excitedly. He replied, 'Not forever. In time the fire at the center will cool, and nothing can go on then.'"

Neither Forster nor my relatives could have imagined the heat of this summer. All three would have understood the peril to human lives it presages.