Another American Adventure: 103

Friday, July 22, 2011

103

Yes, it's hotter than Florida. I saw 103 on a bank sign at about 1PM. It reminded me of when we lived in Eastern Washington and I saw 114 on a bank sign. I had never seen 114 before. I'm not sure about the humidity, but it feels here now as hot as it felt there then.

I arrived in PA last summer at the beginning of July and it was very hot. This is hotter.

Thank goodness we have air conditioning. I wonder how those people without it are doing. I wonder how long this heat will last.

Only one photo from the walk in the woods this morning ...

1 comment:

BarbaraJuly 22, 2011 at 3:26 PM
Even up here in the Cold White North it has been over 90 F. My AC is limited. I bought a portable model, but it is not enough to cool the entire apartment and I am not sure the wiring will stand another. Today there was a good cross ventilation which helped.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.